J. Paul Getty

J. Paul Getty draws on his own experiences of becoming the worlds first generally recognized billionaire to explain money and economics. He does so in a way that is very readable even to the novice. He is surprisingly down to earth and rather philosophical in his discussion of what wealth is, what it means to have wealth and as the title itself states "How to be rich". J. Paul explains in simple terms how stocks, bonds and real estate work. He discusses running a business and the impact of sound business decisions on the economy. He explains clearly the importance of paying employees as well as one can afford because they are ultimately the ones buying the product the company produces. He shows himself to be humble when he discusses real estate and personal possessions pointing out that if you own 4 mansions and 5 yachts, there isn't enough time in the day to use them. They will just sit there collecting dust. He explains how finances work and how to become rich but ultimately he makes a compelling case that being rich is not about piling up possessions, rather it is about investing back into the communities from which the wealth comes. A book that needs to be rediscovered in this age of income inequality and corporate CEO's gone wild.

The autobiography of the then-wealthiest man on Earth. The famed oil man and art collector talks about his life, shortly before his death.

Heir to the philosophical-fantastical tradition of Borges, Calvino, and Perec, The Golden Age is Michal Ajvaz’s greatest and most ambitious work. The Golden Age is a fantastical travelogue in which a modern-day Gulliver writes a book about a civilization he once encountered on a tiny island in the Atlantic. The islanders seem at first to do nothing but sit and observe the world, and indeed draw no distinction between reality and representation, so that a mirror image seems as substantial to them as a person (and vice versa); but the center of their culture is revealed to be “The Book,” a handwritten, collective novel filled with feuding royal families, murderous sorcerers, and narrow escapes. Anyone is free to write in “The Book,” adding their own stories, crossing out others, or even appending “footnotes” in the form of little paper pouches full of extra text—but of course there are pouches within pouches, so that the story is impossible to read “in order,” and soon begins to overwhelm the narrator’s orderly treatise.