If you're planning a career in finance, you'd better do two things: call your mother and tell her goodbye, and get your leisure reading in now. We don't know your mother's phone number, but we do have some reading suggestions:

The Practitioner’s Guide to Investment Banking, Mergers & Acquisitions, Corporate Finance
Jerilyn J. Castillo, Peter J. McAniff
This book is a comprehensive primer on Investment banking. It is rooted in the practical advice as well as experience based methods, and provides clear descriptions and numerical examples of many of the analyses undertaken on the job. Designed to demystify this closed door world, The Practitioner’s Guide clarifies and explains many of the formal and informal aspects of investment banking.



Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies (Fourth Edition)
McKinsey & Company Inc., Tim Koller, Marc Goedhart, David Wessels
At the crossroads of corporate strategy and finance lies valuation. And in today's economy—whether you're a seasoned manager or a budding business professional—it's essential to excel at measuring, managing, and maximizing shareholder and company value. Valuation, hailed by financial professionals worldwide as the single best guide of its kind, will show you how to do just that and much more.

Valuation for Mergers, Buyouts and Restructuring
Enrique Arzac
"Enrique Arzac has created a masterpiece—his work combines the theoretical with the practical. He has created an invaluable reference guide that is thoughtful, complete and very user friendly. He provides insight into the theory behind core valuation, LBO’s, and options pricing, which creates the foundation for mergers, buyouts and restructuring. In addition to the theoretical, he provides practical insight into deal structuring and deal dynamics." — James P. McVeigh, Managing Director, Corporate & Investment Banking, Banc of America Securities


Financial Statement Analysis and Security Valuation
Stephen H. Penman
Penman's Financial Statement Analysis and Security Valuation 2/e focuses on the output of financial statements, not the input. As such, the book asks what financial statements tell you, not how they are prepared. The idea is to get students to see accounting "working." The book focuses on using financial statements in valuation.

Business Analysis and Valuation Using Financial Statements
Krishna Palepu, Paul Healy, and Vic Bernard
Financial statements are the basis for a wide range of business analysis. Managers, securities analysts, bankers and consultants all use them to make business decisions. There is strong demand among business students for course materials that provide a framework for using financial statement data in a variety of business analysis and valuation contexts.

Financial Reporting and Analysis
Lawrence Revsine, Daniel Collins, and W. Bruce Johnson
This book makes a great tool to teach both Intermediate Accounting as well as Financial Statement Analysis. It is particularly useful as a single text that bridges across both these courses.


Principles of Corporate Finance
Richard Brealey, Stewart Myers, and Franklin Allen
This text serves as the gold standard for general corporate finance books, covering such topics as value, risk, capital budgeting, choosing an appropriate capital structure, the time value of money, and many others.



The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade that Transformed Wall Street
Jonathan A. Knee
Knee, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs for four years beginning in 1994 and at Morgan Stanley from 1998 to 2003, describes the operations of these firms and explains the role of investment bankers and how "deals" are done. He weaves a fascinating tale of his employers and a multibillion-dollar industry, which was transformed culturally and structurally by extraordinary growth and then devastating retrenchment at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
The leveraged buyout of the RJR Nabisco Corporation for $25 billion is a landmark in American business history, a story of avarice on an epic scale. Two versions of the fierce competition for the largest buyout ever consummated are presented by skilled journalists with contrasting styles...

Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
Michael Lewis
As described by Lewis, liar's poker is a game played in idle moments by workers on Wall Street, the objective of which is to reward trickery and deceit. With this as a metaphor, Lewis describes his four years with the Wall Street firm Salomon Brothers, from his bizarre hiring through the training program to his years as a successful bond trader.

Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle
John Rolfe and Peter Troob
As eager-beaver business school students, Rolfe and Troob garnered job offers as junior associates at the elite Wall Street investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, lured by dreams of wealth, glamour and power. Readers whose fascination with Wall Street shenanigans has been fueled by Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker will find this thorough rundown of an investment bank associate's daily routine sobering.

Den of Thieves
James B. Stewart
Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Martin Siegel, and Dennis Levine will long be remembered for the Wall Street insider trading scandals of the 1980s. Stewart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter who covered the various scandals, has used his reportage as well as an exhaustive culling of court documents, testimony, and interviews with all of the participants to fashion an authoritative account of what happened.

The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe
In his spellbinding first novel, Wolfe proves that he has the right stuff to write propulsively engrossing fiction. Both his cynical irony and sense of the ridiculous are perfectly suited to his subject: the roiling, corrupt, savage, ethnic melting pot that is New York City. Ranging from the rarefied atmosphere of Park Avenue to the dingy courtrooms of the Bronx, this is a totally credible tale of how the communities uneasily coexist and what happens when they collide.

The Predators' Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junkbond Raiders
Connie Bruck
The first real insight into the world of junk bonds, Drexel Burham Lambert and what an important role they played in the business world -- written at a time when Drexel was at its peak, it was a groundbreaking, highly acclaimed book...



MBA Admissions Strategy: From Profile Building to Essay Writing
A.V. Gordon
This comprehensive guide to the MBA admissions process begins by explaining the needs and motivations of the admissions committee, and then helps readers market themselves in the context of those needs. While the book is well-written and engaging, Gordon lays out a thorough, deliberate approach to the process, and intends the book for people that are committed to working hard and constructing a world-class application.


Enjoy these excellent finance texts and stories of life on Wall Street. And don't forget to call your mother!

Note: Some descriptions above are provided by Library Journal; description of "The Accidental Investment Banker" provided by Booklist.