My take on investing books
I always enjoy reading a well-written book on investing, and not because I am learning something new each time. In fact, after you are done with a half-dozen or so really good books, you pretty much know all there is to know about investing, and rest is mere detail.
Rather, what I really like is the style of writing, which separates the winner from the also-ran. Investing is as complex a subject as any branch of modern science (probably more so, because investing also involves human psychology and behavior, a topic not well understood yet). But the author must still get the message across to the layperson as well as the intellectual, because money management knows no social hierarchy.
Striking this delicate balance between presenting hard concepts and facts, and explaining them in a way ordinary people can understand and follow, is what makes a good, even great, investing book. There are many ways to tell a story, but the one who does it best gets my vote (or in this case, my money).
The problem is, when you visit the “investing and personal finance” aisle in a book store, you are immediately swamped with books of all sizes and colors (a search for “investing” on Amazon throws up over 163,000 entries
). It is hard to figure out if the book you just forked $29.95 for is really worth it.
What I do is reverse the order – I figure it out first, and then buy. I go visit the local public library (my favorite spot in town, next to my home and the chinese buffet nearby), which has pretty much every book on investing under the sun. If I like a book that I read from here, I buy a copy for myself.
The only time I break this read-first-buy-next rule is when I come across an investing book that sells for under $5 in the “bargain price” section of the book store. As long as it has all pages intact (and there are at least 200 of them, so I can be sure I am not paying $5 for a newsletter!) and does not look overused, the book is a good bet for me, even if I never heard of it before. I still flip through a few pages to make sure this is not a total dummy. So far, I haven’t regretted a single purchase I made this way.
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