THE next time you are wandering through a bookstore or browsing Barnes & Noble’s website looking for a book for yourself or to buy as a gift, you might want to have this article with you.

This article is devoted to some financial books worth owning. They represent great literature, some of them are entertaining and the more prosaic ones can help boost your net worth if you read past the book jackets.

In no particular order, here are the picks:

. The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas J Stanley and William D Danko (Long Street Press, 1996).

This book is nearly ten years old, but it’s still relevant to those who wonder why their investment accounts aren’t on steroids. What the authors make clear is that the people who earn huge salaries are often not the ones who have crossed over to millionaire status.

Many millionaires live well below their means and believe that financial independence is more important than outspending their friends and neighbours. Many of them don’t live in fancy neighbourhoods. Their shopping lists don’t include expensive watches or bags, high-end sport utility vehicles and just about anything advertised in The New Yorker.

Thirty per cent of millionaires, who were surveyed for the book, owned a credit card from JC Penney. Read The Millionaire Next Door, and you might be inspired to act like a real millionaire instead of spending like a fake one.

. Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, Roger Lowenstein (Random House, 1995). The recent story of the San Diego teenager, who won a US$100,000 college scholarship for developing a theorem to solve a 19th century math puzzler called the Dirichlet Problem – huh? – makes this book worth noting. Some people are just born smarter than others.

This entertaining book illustrates how Buffett began exhibiting his own financial genius at an age when most kids are sitting on the couch watching cartoons. Buffett, who his sister recalled, “lived and breathed numbers,” bought his first stock – three shares – when he was eleven years old. He sunk money from his lucrative paper route into 40 acres of farmland by the time he was 14.

The book introduces you to Buffett’s considerable milestones, from learning about the financial markets from the storied Benjamin Graham to turning his abilities to pick stocks and buy companies into a multibillion-dollar enterprise.

If you like the Buffett book, you may want to plunge into another Lowenstein title, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management, which exhaustively – details the once-celebrated hedge fund’s colossal collapse. The book may renew one’s faith in the average Joe, since two Nobel Prize economists, along with various run-of-the-mill PhDs, managed to steer the high-flying hedge fund straight into the dirt.

. Work Less, Live More, The New Way to Retire Early, Bob Clyatt (Nolo, 2005). The aim of this book is to provide advice and encouragement to people who want to give semi-retirement a try.

Sections on developing a retirement portfolio and a withdrawal strategy are certainly valuable for those who have already retired. Clyatt backs up his advice on investing and spending during retirement with solid academic research.

. Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation, Edward Chancellor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). This book comes from the reading list compiled by Dennis Zocco, a professor of finance and investments at the University of San Diego.

After finishing this tome, you’ll understand the reasons for every significant speculative bubble from the notorious tulip mania in Holland in the 1630s, to the modern-day excesses. The book doesn’t cover the dot-com bust, but you’ll appreciate how the insanity happened by reading it.

. The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You’ll Ever Need, Larry Swedroe (St. Martin’s Press, 2005). The title is a bit hokey, but for the individual investor, the advice could be as valuable as the recipe for Coca-Cola. This is an excellent primer for investors who want to learn how they can build a diversified portfolio of inexpensive index funds.

The book will also be a good read for stock-picking skeptics, who can’t fathom why people like me are such relentless nags about the wisdom of passive investing. Another wonderful book that extols the wisdom of indexing is The Four Pillars of Investing, by William Bernstein.

. Credit Repair, 7th Edition, Robin Leonard (Nolo, 2005). The New Year’s resolution for many individuals won’t involve opening an individual retirement account, boosting their pension contributions or sinking money into a college savings plan. Their goal will be to extract themselves from debt.

This pragmatic book can help motivated readers do just that. The topics that Leonard covers include eliminating debt, building and maintaining good credit, and cleaning up credit files. Following this book’s suggestions should help readers shake off the debt collectors and start the New Year right.

– Copley News Service

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of ‘The Retirement Bible’ and ‘The Investing Bible’.