"Money may be the root of all evil, but what would we do without it? The books below are not a guide to the getting of money. Instead, they are books that goaded me into abandoning poverty. Which is a different thing - at least, for those of us who have been poor."
"Money may be the root of all evil, but what would we do without it? The books below are not a guide to the getting of money. Instead, they are books that go... more
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1
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
This is the Dickens novel I return to most often. Great Expectations has been described as
This is the Dickens novel I return to most often. Great Expectations has been described as
2
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson
When all is said and done, what is this classic adventure (supposedly written for children, but read more often by adults) all about? It is about the getting of money. The hero is an annoying twerp. The so-called good-guys are cut from one-dimensional cloth. But the villain ... oh, the villain! Is there a better-drawn character in popular British fiction than Long John Silver? George Smiley cannot hold a candle to him. What a man! What a rotten, debased, money-driven, thieving, double-dealing pirate! And he redeems himself, too! The favourite book of my childhood and a model for my career since. (The edition illustrated by the great Ralph Steadman is the one to go for).
When all is said and done, what is this classic adventure (supposedly written for children, but read more often by adults) all about? It is about the getting of money. The hero is an annoying twerp. The so-called good-guys are cut from one-dimensional cloth. But the villain ... oh, the villain! Is there a better-drawn character in popular British fiction than Long John Silver? George Smiley cannot hold a candle to him. What a man! What a rotten, debased, money-driven, thieving, double-dealing pirate! And he redeems himself, too! The favourite book of my childhood and a model for my career since. (The edition illustrated by the great Ralph Steadman is the one to go for).
3
The Essays: Counsels Civil and Moral
Francis Bacon
Not a nice man. Not even a good writer, except in his ability to condense the mundane into wit:
Not a nice man. Not even a good writer, except in his ability to condense the mundane into wit:
4
The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh to His Brother
Vincent Van Gogh
What have these letters to do with the getting of money? Everything and nothing. Nothing because Vincent never sought money, except to eat and paint. Everything because the only way for most people to acquire money is to proceed as if such a quest is mad. Just as Vincent was mad, both metaphorically and in the flesh. When the going gets tough, when fortune and luck desert you, when bankruptcy is looming and all seems lost in the idiotic quest to be richer than your neighbour, possession of this book will winch you back from the brink of capitulation. It is the story of a man who never gave in. (The drawings aren't bad, either!)
5
Common Sense
Thomas Paine
A pamphlet of such lucidity and power it
6
The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith
I have to be kidding, right? Who in their right mind would wade through an unabridged version (and most abridged versions are a menace) of such a tome? My answer is: anyone who wants to understand capitalism and the conditions in which entrepreneurs survive and prosper. Besides, it's not as heavy going as you might think - especially if you purchase an edition with a running commentary in the margin and a superb index. There is a damn good reason this book is still in print 230 years after its first publication. Don't let its scholarly reputation put you off.
7
Wine
Hugh Johnson
A crucial spur. An early edition, abandoned in a boarding house by an over-the-hill opera singer fleeing his landlord, made its surprising way into my hands in the mid-70s. So this was how the rich spent their dosh? It took another ten years before I pulled the cork from my first bottle of decent Margaux - after that, it was plain sailing. There may be fancier books on wine today, but the enthusiasm and joie de vivre present in this early Johnson guide can still send me humming down to my cellar in search of yet another gift from the gods of the grape.
8
The Buildings of England Sir Nikolaus Pevsner
Sir Nikolaus Pevsner
Another spur. Bless Penguin Books and, especially, bless the publisher Allen Lane, who made this series possible. Mr Lane did more for grammar school boys like me than all the post-war educational ministers rolled together. Here was glory. Here was beauty. And here was a fuzzy marker that not all Germans were the 'bad guys' - Pevsner was a German Jew who escaped Hitler in the 1930s. Above all, here was money. By God, what had it cost to erect these marvels?
9
An Anthology of World Poetry
Mark von Doren
A generous, wide-ranging, eye-opening collection. Inside its battered covers, (which still have pride of place among hundreds of books of verse on my shelves), I met Andr� Spire for the first time. And Francois Villon. And Thomas Love Peacock and a hundred others. As to the getting of money, Villon was a burglar and murderer - a one-man university on the joys of ill-gotten loot. Besides, I knew that if I wished to become a poet myself, I should have to make lots and lots of money, if I was to avoid the usual, dreary poet-in-the-rat-infested-garret syndrome.
10
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Charles Mackay
Once read, never forgotten. Mackay was a journalist and poet whose work is forgotten today, apart from this one marvellous book published in 1841. I won't spoil it by even hinting at the examples he chooses to illustrate outbreaks of public mania and mass idiocy, but his conclusions should be irresistible to anyone seeking wealth: (1) There's one born every minute; (2) Large lies are more easily believed than small lies; (3) When the music stops, be somewhere else.
[source: Felix Dennis ]
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