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What we recommend

Six books.

There is no list of five books you must read this summer. What is worth reading depends on where you are, what you want to learn, and what is live at work and at home. These are six we recommend to anyone who asks. Three of them contain no investing at all. That is deliberate. And they do not agree with each other — one argues fairly directly against how we invest, which is exactly why it is here.

1. 1

   Simple Wealth, Inevitable Wealth

   Nick Murray

   If you read only one, read this. It is not about what to buy. It is about behaving well for thirty years, which is the whole of the difficulty.

2. 2

   A Wealth of Common Sense

   Ben Carlson

   The simplest explanation of why complexity costs money. Not widely read in India, and it should be.

3. 3

   The Most Important Thing

   Howard Marks

   The book on this shelf that argues with the others. It takes you out of the comfort of simple rules and into risk itself — what it actually is, why it is not volatility, and why the work is to know the knowable rather than predict the unknowable. Hardest on the do-it-yourself investor, and most useful there.

4. 4

   How to Win Friends and Influence People

   Dale Carnegie

   No investing in it whatsoever. It is on this list because how a person deals with other people determines most of what happens to them, including financially.

5. 5

   The War of Art

   Steven Pressfield

   About why we do not do the things we have decided to do. The will not written. The plan not started. The cover not bought. Pressfield names the thing and shows how professionals get past it.

6. 6

   The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

   Charlie Mackesy

   A hundred drawings and a handful of conversations, and somehow the whole of what financial life planning is reaching for. Life, at the end of it, is simple. This book says so without saying so.