100 books like J R

This is the oldest book on my list, a nineteenth-century compilation of lunacy of all sorts, with a focus on financial lunacy. Mackay aptly compares widespread mass delusions (think Nostradamus, or alchemy) to financial bubbles, including the frenzies surrounding the South Sea Company in England and tulip bulbs in Holland. Some scholars question the historical accuracy of Mackay’s stories, particularly about valuable tulip bulbs being accidentally eaten, but he has the money quote of all time regarding financial scandals: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds. It will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” If you want a more scholarly description of how speculative bubbles form and burst, try Charles P. Kindleberger’s Manias, Panics, and Crashes. But if you want to be shocked and entertained, read Mackay.

Because I was a prosecutor on the Enron case, people often ask me what to read about it (or even to explain it to them!). At the time, we used to say that Enron was calculus to every other case’s algebra when it came to corporate financial fraud. Elkind and McLean (McLean had a lot to do with questioning Enron’s narrative before the company’s decline) have done the definitive job of explaining a very hard case in accessible style and detail. The truth is that accounting fraud is a very technical form of corporate fraud, sometimes painfully so. But, as I tell my students, the people who work at companies on these kinds of things are no smarter, and often no older, than my students. They just speak a different language. Don’t let that obfuscate matters. Learn the lingo and follow the money. Smartest Guys allows the general reader to… show more.

Out of all the investigative reporting that emerged from the 2008 financial meltdown, Henriques’ account of the scheme that out-Ponzied Ponzi is the book that stays with me.

The Madoff story is about brazen lies and insatiable greed, to be sure, but Henriques’ approach is nuanced, thorough, yet accessible, showing the complacency (one might say complicity) of investors and regulators, dazzled or cowed by Madoff’s magic.

How do you pull off a $65 billion scam? With a lot of help. 

There should be at least one book about the 1920s on this list, and this one deserves mention because it elegantly brings to life several of the most interesting characters from that era. There are some dubious ones, such as Jesse Livermore, the “Boy Plunger” who operated bucket shops, shady financial firms that manipulated stocks with fake news. And there are more legitimate leaders of the era: Pierpont Morgan’s son, Jack, and his brainier partner, Tom Lamont, and the power brokers of Kuhn Loeb. Brooks vividly skewers all of them. He misspelled “Golkonda,” but the essence of his story nails the excesses of the era, and is an apt reminder of how much wealth and economic inequality can result from the Federal Reserve going wild with loose monetary policy.

This book taught me that great satire spares no one. It’s not about one group in society or one ideology—it skewers all of them equally, one after another until we see the flaws in human nature that underlie all of them. You could say it’s a very pessimistic book, but I didn’t read it that way.

Seeing your shortcomings, individual or social, is the first step to overcoming them.

This was one of the hardest books to "get into," but a friend of mine told me to stick with it because the rewards of getting through the first quarter would be so great. I'm glad I did. It is an astounding piece of work, quite different from anything I've ever read before or since, and remains one of my top five books.

The tangents the book takes, and the blasé attributes of the leading character are superbly crafted. It was suggested it was "unfilmable," and there's one scene in particular I thought they'd never get away with, but if you look at the movie version carefully, it's in there. 

Really hard to pick just one Pynchon for this list, as he is an all-around master of satire. But Inherent Vice is probably his LOL funniest, a stoner take on the detective genre set in the hippie world of 1970s southern California. The cinematic adaptation by Paul Thomas Anderson ain’t half bad, either. 

Giants defecating, fornicating, getting drunk, and having a gay old time – does literature get any better than this? The answer is no, of course.

The fact that it was written by a French monk in the sixteenth century boggles the mind even further – he certainly got into his fair share of trouble for this masterpiece of the bawdy and grotesque. The novel’s anti-authoritarian ethos, its celebration of the carnivalesque, was later discoursed upon by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, one of the greatest works of literary criticism ever written. 

The book’s massive length is equivalent to about four modern novels, but it remains a fascinating read—even if I found few of the characters to be truly likable.

Like the Victorians themselves, Trollope’s writing style feels to me both old-fashioned and modern at the same time. To read this work today is to discover many similarities between their “now” (circa 1875) and ours.

Some things never change, including the chase for money and status, the societal traditions and prejudices that can be hard to overcome, and the ways lust and greed can upend just about any of our better human impulses.

I picked this novel for this list because it makes an interesting contrast to North and South, and not just because they deal with different levels of society (working class vs. “genteel”).

In Gaskell’s book, most of the characters are searching for moral high ground as they try to… show more.

While Graham is the pioneer of value investing, there’s no question that his student, employee, and, ultimately, close friend Warren Buffett is its most successful practitioner. Although the essence of their respective approaches is similar, there are some important differences to understand. As the best book about Buffett’s investing style that I’ve encountered thus far, Hagstrom’s The Warren Buffett Way highlights some of Buffett’s most astonishing investment coups and the logic behind them. Upon reading both of those books, the reader will have gained a nuanced understanding of how Buffett took the Graham approach to business valuation/security selection and improved upon it.