Read all values from CSV into a List using CsvHelper

If all you need is the string values for each row in an array, you could use the parser directly.

var parser = new CsvParser( textReader );
while( true )
{
    string[] row = parser.Read();
    if( row == null )
    {
        break;
    }
}

http://joshclose.github.io/CsvHelper/#reading-parsing

Update

Version 3 has support for reading and writing IEnumerable properties.

According to @Marc L's post you can try this:

public static List<string> ReadInCSV(string absolutePath) {
    List<string> result = new List<string>();
    string value;
    using (TextReader fileReader = File.OpenText(absolutePath)) {
        var csv = new CsvReader(fileReader);
        csv.Configuration.HasHeaderRecord = false;
        while (csv.Read()) {
           for(int i=0; csv.TryGetField<string>(i, out value); i++) {
                result.Add(value);
            }
        }
    }
    return result;
}

The whole point here is to read all lines of CSV and deserialize it to a collection of objects. I'm not sure why do you want to read it as a collection of strings. Generic ReadAll() would probably work the best for you in that case as stated before. This library shines when you use it for that purpose:

using System.Linq;

...
using (var reader = new StreamReader(path))
using (var csv = new CsvReader(reader))
{
    var yourList = csv.GetRecords<YourClass>().ToList();
}

If you don't use ToList() - it will return a single record at a time (for better performance), please read https://joshclose.github.io/CsvHelper/examples/reading/enumerate-class-records