Great books to help you investEveryone has their favourite investment books. Some are intensely boring, but full of information you need to digest. I remember, early in my career, being started on a couple of those - it nearly put me off investing for life. So I'm going to look at books that maybe won't instruct you in the niceties of the latest International Accounting Standards, but will inspire you as an investor and perhaps get you thinking about value, debt, money and the stock market  in ways you hadn't before.

I've got to start with Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor [1] , a key text for any investor who wants to understand what value is and how to search for it. Granted, some of the accounting techniques and the way the stock market works have changed since Graham wrote in 1949, but the focus on value and on the patient and logical examination of each investment is timeless.

Want to follow up on the value investor idea? Then get reading on the Berkshire Hathaway annual reports [2] . If you don't think that sounds very interesting, then let me tell you that it's Warren Buffett who runs this investment vehicle, and he and his partner Charlie Munger tell it like it is - no weasel words in their discussion of the year. Buffett openly admits to his mistakes, and analyses them to see what went wrong. He also writes about the economy generally, the stock market, and car insurance, in his letters to shareholders [3] . While I don't think Buffett always gets it right, his reasoning is always interesting and his letters are both easy reading, and guaranteed to make you think.

If you' re looking for a good story with direct relevance for today's market, JK Galbraith's The Great Crash [4] remains a classic with its insights into speculative boom and bust. The Florida land boom, the way land holdings were divided and subdivided, people buying properties they'd never seen just for the speculative value - it's not all that different from the overseas property boom of the past few years, which saw people buying Bulgarian ski chalets at a 'guaranteed' eight percent yield, or jatropha plantations and Ukrainian wheat fields.  Galbraith's dark humour spices up the tale.

While…

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