From Mark Ford, editor, Creating Wealth: I’ve been asked the question of which books most influenced my life before. I’ve meant to answer it… but have never sat down long enough to think about it.

In terms of personal productivity and accomplishing things, two books stand out.

The first is How to Win Friends & Influence People, which helped me understand why I couldn’t get moving (too many competing goals).

The second is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which helped me understand why, after getting rich, I still had not yet accomplished other perhaps more important goals (such as writing a book, making a movie, etc.).

Here are some other books that have influenced me for the better:

Motivation in the Real World, by Saul Gellerman—got me thinking about how to get the most out of people in business.

Review Text in French, Three Years, by Eli Blume—a single text I used to acquire fluency in French.

A Glossary of Literary Terms, by M.H. Abrams—for giving me the tools I used to understand and talk about literature.

The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White—for teaching me the fundamentals of prose style.

The Old Man and The Sea and a half-dozen other Hemingway novels—for letting me see what “prose style” means when it matters.

The Painted Word, by Tom Wolfe, opened my eyes to modern art—how it developed historically and how the art world is political.

The Poetics, by Aristotle—gave me a fundamental understanding of drama that has helped me understand all forms of drama, including movies and some fiction.

The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot—and in particular the edition that contained the editorial marks by Ezra Pound—got me excited about what poetry could be and how it can be constructed.

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov—gave me the measure of what a novel could be.

Ten Philosophical Mistakes, by Mortimer Adler, and The Consolations of Philosophy, by Alain de Botton, for answering some of the questions I had about the major philosophies.

Reeves’ Note: You may wonder how Mark squeezes so many books into his busy life. He reveals his prolific book-reading methodology in an April 13 Daily essay entitled “How to Read an Extra 52 Helpful Books This Year.”