Here are links to some of my favorite books... And yes, if you click on the links, I get a small fee, which doesn't raise the price you pay by so much as a fiat cent.
The Intelligent Investor: This is the best book on business and investment that I have ever read. I liked it so much that I read it during classes in college... While I did pretty terrible in said classes (and made a few professors hate me), it was totally worth it. :)
The Black Swan: My favorite book on knowing about what you don't actually know. The ideas here greatly shaped how I think about things... A lot of people don't like Taleb's ego, but he does raise a bunch of good points that have the potential to save your ass.
Investing: The Last Liberal Art: Makes correlations between investment and other areas of study... I probably liked it so much because I ended up with a degree in General Studies. There is some sort of bias in there, somewhere.
Paths To Wealth Through Common Stocks: Phil Fisher's less famous book... I actually found it more interesting that Common Stocks & Uncommon Profits. It talks a lot about inflation and technological advancement... a great read.
Keynes And The Market: I may not like his economic theories, but he is one of the most quotable contrarians ever.
Comic Wars: This is the book that likely gave me a sympathetic view to activist investors. A great case study on re-organization and the feuds that take place in them.
Value Investing: From Graham To Buffett & Beyond: This is one of the first books I read on value investing. I got it for free from my dad, right around the time that I read the Intelligent Investor... I read a good bit of it while sitting in an auto repair shop while having a new master cylinder put in my first truck. The great thing about this book is that it does a lot to explain how the economics of value investing work and also has a bunch of case studies (which, given the time since the book was written, you can see how they played out!)
Atlas Shrugged: The name of this blog comes from the bad ass known as Ragnar Danneskjold. Need I say more?
Post Office: A Charles Bukowski classic... c'mon, you didn't actually think that I just liked investing... right?
Walden: On a more serious note, this is a great one by Henry David Thoreau. I think that it is often a mistake for people, investors especially, to only read about 1 subject- be it investment, politics, or knitting. Walden definitely does a good job of making you think outside of the box. Download the thing for free on your Kindle.
Brave New World & Brave New World Revisited: Aldous Huxley making a crazy dystopian prediction that seems to be in the right realm of where we are/where we are going. Plus you get to read about him talking how he was right and Orwell was wrong. Cool stuff.
