Warren Buffett’s Books: The Ones He Recommends and the Ones About Him

The Warren Buffett books worth an executive’s time come to six he recommends and three about him. He recommends The Intelligent Investor, Security Analysis, Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, Business Adventures, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing and Poor Charlie’s Almanack. About him, read The Snowball, Roger Lowenstein’s biography and Lawrence Cunningham’s Essays. The best of the lot costs nothing.

Somebody at dinner asks which Buffett book to start with. You name The Snowball because it is the one you have seen, and then remember it is nearly a thousand pages long and that you stopped around the Omaha childhood. The airport shop has four more with his face on the cover, none of which he wrote.

That is the problem with this shelf. Buffett has written no book. He has written sixty years of letters, said a great deal on a stage in Omaha, and let a small industry grow up around repackaging both. So the useful question is which Warren Buffett books he has put his own name behind, and which of the books about him tell you something the letters do not.

Why There Are Two Lists

The first list is books Buffett has recommended himself, in a shareholder letter or at an annual meeting, where the recommendation can be checked. We left out anything resting on a secondhand “Buffett’s favourite” claim. That rule cut the field hard.

The second list is books about him, written by people who had access. There are dozens. Three earn their place, and one of the three is really a book by him in disguise. For each we give the single idea it carries, who should read it first, and whether a busy person reads it or skims it. Our newsroom’s test is the one we use for how to read more books when you run a business: does it change a decision this quarter?

Warren Buffett Books: The Ones He Recommends

Book	Author	Year	What it is for	Read or skim
The Intelligent Investor	Benjamin Graham	1949	Temperament: Mr Market and margin of safety	Read chapters 8 and 20, skim the rest
Security Analysis	Benjamin Graham and David Dodd	1934	The method, in full, for professionals	Skim, unless you analyse businesses for a living
Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits	Philip Fisher	1958	Judging a business by asking the people around it	Read the scuttlebutt chapters
Business Adventures	John Brooks	1969	How companies and executives fail in practice	Read, slowly, one story at a time
The Little Book of Common Sense Investing	John Bogle	2007	Why costs decide most outcomes	Read in an evening
Poor Charlie’s Almanack	Charlie Munger, edited by Peter Kaufman	2005	Mental models and how to think about thinking	Read the talks, skip the scrapbook
The Snowball	Alice Schroeder	2008	The whole life, with the unflattering parts left in	Read if you want the person; skim if you want the method
Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist	Roger Lowenstein	1995	The investing career, told by a financial journalist	Read, the better first biography
The Essays of Warren Buffett	Warren Buffett, arranged by Lawrence Cunningham	1997	The letters, sorted by subject	Read, first of all nine

The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis

Buffett bought The Intelligent Investor in 1949, the year it came out, and he has returned to the purchase in print more than once. In his 2013 letter to shareholders he wrote that of all the investments he ever made, buying Ben’s book was the best, except for his purchase of two marriage licenses. He also said which parts mattered. The key points, for him, were laid out in what later editions labelled Chapters 8 and 20, and those points guide his investing decisions today.

Take him at his word and read those two chapters. Chapter 8 is the one with Mr Market, the manic business partner who offers you a price every day and whom you are free to ignore. Chapter 20 is the margin of safety. Between them they cover the temperament half of investing, which is the half most executives get wrong, because the people who run companies are selected for confidence rather than for patience.

Security Analysis is a different kind of object. Graham and David Dodd published it in 1934 while teaching at Columbia, and the New York Times later observed that it was intended as a common-sense guide for investors but turned out to be a thick textbook. Buffett’s own tribute came fifty years on, in a 1984 talk at Columbia, where he said the secret had been out for fifty years, ever since Ben Graham and Dave Dodd wrote Security Analysis.

Our position is that a busy executive should own it and leave it unread. Unless you analyse businesses for a living, the method you need is in Graham’s two chapters and in the Berkshire letters. Keep it for the day you are asked to value something.

Fisher, Brooks and Bogle

Philip Fisher’s Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits appeared in 1958 and is the book that moved Buffett from buying cheap companies to buying good ones. At the 2018 annual meeting he called it a very, very good book and said Fisher’s scuttlebutt technique is still a good way to invest, and that Todd Combs and Ted Weschler at Berkshire still use it. At the 2004 meeting he had already called Fisher’s two books terrific.

Scuttlebutt is the idea to take away. Fisher judged a company by talking to its customers, suppliers, former employees and competitors, and trusted them over the company’s own account of itself. Any executive sizing up an acquisition, a hire or a new market can run the same method in a fortnight of calls. If cold-calling a competitor’s former sales director makes you wince, our networking tips for introverts cover how to do it without becoming someone you are not.

Business Adventures is the odd one on the list because it is about neither investing nor Buffett. John Brooks wrote the twelve pieces for The New Yorker and the collection came out in 1969. Buffett lent his copy to Bill Gates, who first read it in 1991 and has called it the best business book he has read, according to the Princeton Alumni Weekly, which also notes the stories range from the Ford Edsel to the Piggly Wiggly grocery chain and to how Xerox failed to act on its own research.

What it carries is a feel for how decisions go wrong inside real companies. The Edsel chapter alone is worth the price for any executive who has commissioned research and then acted on what they already believed. Read it a story at a time, the way Gates reads during a think week, and it will outlast most of what is on this list.

John Bogle’s The Little Book of Common Sense Investing earned the most direct endorsement Buffett has given any living author’s work. In the 2014 letter he told investors tempted by expensive advice to instead read Jack Bogle’s book, and in the same letter he set out what he had told the trustee of his own estate: put ten percent of the cash in short-term government bonds and ninety percent in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund. Two years later, in the 2016 letter, he wrote that if a statue is ever erected to honour the person who has done the most for American investors, the hands-down choice should be Jack Bogle, and that both large and small investors should stick with low-cost index funds.

The one idea is that costs decide most outcomes over a working life. It can be finished on a flight. If the index fund case is new to you, start with our plain comparison of an index fund versus a mutual fund, then check where the result would put you against our net worth by age benchmarks. For most senior people, a single well-argued salary negotiation email moves the lifetime number more than any choice between two funds, and Bogle’s point is what you do with the money after that.

Poor Charlie’s Almanack and the Rest of the Bookworm Table

Poor Charlie’s Almanack collects Charlie Munger’s talks and was first published in 2005, and Buffett’s recommendation of it in the 2010 letter is the lightest recommendation he has written. Just buy a copy and carry it around, he said, and it will make you look urbane and erudite. He called it the ever-popular book about his partner, and the Bookworm stall at the annual meeting carries it.

The idea it carries is the latticework of mental models, the habit of borrowing the big ideas from several disciplines and running every decision past all of them. Our piece on Charlie Munger’s mental models is a faster route to the same place. The Almanack itself is large, heavy and oddly designed. Read the talks, particularly the one on the psychology of human misjudgement, and ignore the scrapbook pages around them.

Buffett names other books most years. In the 2012 letter he called William Thorndike’s The Outsiders an outstanding book about CEOs who excelled at capital allocation, which makes it the most directly useful title here for anyone who decides where a company’s cash goes. In 2016 he called Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog the best book he had read that year. CNBC keeps a running list of the letter recommendations if you want the long tail.

The Books About Him: Schroeder, Lowenstein and Cunningham

Alice Schroeder’s The Snowball is the authorised life. It was published by Bantam in September 2008, runs to 976 pages in hardback, and was written by the one Wall Street analyst Buffett would speak to, who left Morgan Stanley in 2003 and moved to Omaha to write it. She spent more than two thousand hours in his personal files. Before she began, he told her he would ask for no revisions and that where accounts differed she should use the less flattering version.

That instruction is the book’s one idea, and it is a management idea rather than an investing one. A man at the top of his field chose to let a stranger print the worse version of every story. Read it if you want the person. If you want the method, it is a long way round.

Roger Lowenstein’s Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist came first, from Random House in 1995, written by a Wall Street Journal reporter of more than a decade. It is the better first biography for a working executive because Lowenstein is interested in the investing career and keeps the life in proportion. It stops in the mid-1990s, which matters little, because the method was fully formed by then and the later decades are mostly scale.

Lawrence Cunningham’s The Essays of Warren Buffett is the one that is really a Buffett book. Cunningham, a law professor, prepared the collection for a 1997 symposium at Cardozo Law School, taking the shareholder letters apart and reassembling them by subject: governance, finance, acquisitions, accounting. Buffett endorsed it at the 2000 annual meeting as the most representative book on his views, because, as he put it, Cunningham essentially took his words and rearranged them, and the arrangement by theme makes it a lot easier to read than going through year after year.

If you read one book from either list, read this one. Everything in the recommended list is context for it.

What a Busy Executive Should Skip

Skip The Snowball unless you have a long holiday and a real interest in the man. Nearly a thousand pages is a poor trade when Cunningham gives you Buffett’s own reasoning in a fifth of the space.

Skip anything with Buffett’s name in the title that he did not write and did not recommend. The shelf of “the Buffett way” and “invest like Buffett” titles is long, and the better ones are summaries of the letters, which you can read yourself. The exception is a book that reports something new, such as Lowenstein’s.

Skip the idea that any of this will make you a stock picker. Buffett’s advice to his own family, written down in 2013, was an index fund. What the books are for is the quality of your thinking about businesses, including the one you run, and the discipline of saying no, which is the point of the Warren Buffett 5/25 rule that circulates under his name.

The Free Book Nobody Finishes

The shareholder letters are published on Berkshire Hathaway’s own site at no charge, going back decades, and they are arguably the best Warren Buffett book of all, because they are the only one he wrote. Every book about him quotes from them. Cunningham’s Essays is them, sorted.

Nobody finishes them because they arrive as dozens of PDFs with no index, and because the early ones are full of textile mills and trading stamps. Read a recent one first so you know the voice. The 2013 and 2014 letters, linked above, are as good a start as any, and two hours with each gives you more of the method than most people who own the whole shelf.

A practical way to do it is to put one letter a week into your productivity plan as a fixed block, the way you would a standing meeting. The logic is the same as the protected first hour in Jeff Bezos’s morning routine. The thinking gets a slot before the day can take it.

How to Read Them Without Becoming a Fan

The risk with Buffett is that the reading turns into collecting. There is a lot to collect, and fans know all of it and change nothing.

Read for the decision. Before you open any of these, write down the one judgement you are facing this quarter: whether to buy the business, whether to keep the underperforming division, whether to take the board seat. Then read Graham’s two chapters, Fisher’s scuttlebutt chapters and one Cunningham section with that decision in front of you. Our guide on how to learn faster makes the case that a live problem is what turns reading into learning.

Keep what you keep in your own words. Munger’s models and Graham’s margin of safety only work when they come to mind at the moment you need them, which is the argument of our piece on how to remember things quickly. A line you have restated to yourself is a line you can use in a meeting. A line you underlined is gone by Friday.

Stop when the ideas repeat. They repeat quickly, because there are only a handful of them: buy good businesses at fair prices, keep costs down, stay inside your circle of competence, and say no to almost everything. Once you have heard each of those in his own letters, the ninth book has nothing to add.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which Warren Buffett book should I read first?

The Essays of Warren Buffett, arranged by Lawrence Cunningham. It is the shareholder letters sorted by subject, and Buffett has called it the most representative book on his views. Follow it with chapters 8 and 20 of The Intelligent Investor.

Did Warren Buffett write any books himself?

No. His writing is in the annual letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, which are free on the company’s site. Every book with his name on the cover was written or compiled by someone else, including The Essays, which is his words in Cunningham’s order.

Is The Snowball worth reading for a busy executive?

Only if you want the life rather than the method. It is nearly a thousand pages, written with Buffett’s instruction to use the less flattering version of any story. For the business thinking, Lowenstein’s 1995 biography is shorter and Cunningham’s Essays are more direct.

Read the letters first, and read the other eight only as far as they send you back to them.