Bill Gates Reading List: Every Book He Has Recommended

Bill Gates has been publishing book recommendations since 2010. Twice a year — at summer and the holidays — he releases a curated list on his blog, GatesNotes, accompanied by thoughtful mini-essays explaining exactly what he found valuable and why.

His reading spans an extraordinary range: epidemiology, climate science, African history, global health, military biography, literary fiction. Gates reads everything. And unlike many public figures who casually drop book titles, his recommendations come with the kind of specificity that only someone who actually finished the book — and thought hard about it — can provide.

This page collects his most significant and consistently recommended titles, organised by theme.

Science and the Natural World

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Gates has praised this book as the single best introduction to science for non-scientists he has encountered. Bryson traces the history of scientific discovery across physics, chemistry, geology, and biology with wit and clarity that makes even quantum mechanics feel accessible. Gates has recommended it to his children and referenced it in multiple GatesNotes posts over the years.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

One of Gates’s most-cited books, The Selfish Gene reframes evolution from the perspective of genes rather than organisms. Gates describes it as one of those books that permanently restructures how you see the world. He first read it in the 1970s and has returned to it repeatedly. The concept of the “meme” — originally coined here — alone makes it worth reading.

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Gates recommended this as a holiday book pick specifically because it delivers genuine scientific understanding in under two hours of reading. Tyson covers dark matter, dark energy, the Big Bang, and the laws of physics with an economy that most science communicators fail to achieve.

History and Society

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

One of Gates’s most enthusiastically promoted books. He described Sapiens as one of the most important books he has read in a decade. Harari’s sweeping account of human history — from the cognitive revolution through the agricultural and industrial ages — asks uncomfortable questions about progress that most history books avoid.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

Gates has referenced Diamond’s thesis — that geography rather than race or culture explains which civilisations dominated others — in multiple posts on global development and inequality. Guns, Germs, and Steel gave Gates a framework he has used repeatedly when thinking about why some countries are rich and others poor.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Gates chose this as a rare foray into American social history in his reading recommendations. Wilkerson’s chronicle of the Great Migration — six million Black Americans who moved from the South between 1915 and 1970 — is told through three individual stories that Gates found more illuminating than any policy paper.

Business and Economics

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

Gates picked The Psychology of Money shortly after publication and described it as essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why people make the financial decisions they do. Housel’s core argument — that financial success is more about behaviour than intellect — resonated with Gates’s own views on the irrational side of human decision-making.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Gates has cited Kahneman’s two-system model of cognition across many interviews and posts. The distinction between fast, intuitive thinking and slow, deliberate reasoning underpins everything from his views on philanthropy to how he runs meetings. This is one of the books he most consistently recommends to people starting careers in any field.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard Thaler

Gates recommended this alongside Thinking, Fast and Slow as a paired read. Thaler’s account of how he and colleagues built the field of behavioural economics — fighting mainstream economists who assumed humans were rational — is both intellectually serious and genuinely funny.

Health and Medicine

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Gates has called Being Mortal one of the most important books he has ever read. Gawande’s examination of how modern medicine handles aging and death — and how poorly it does so — led Gates to change how he thought about his own philanthropic work in healthcare. He has gifted it widely and promoted it in multiple annual reading lists.

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Gates described this biography of cancer as one of the most ambitious books he has encountered: the story of humanity’s centuries-long struggle against a disease that in some sense is caused by life itself. He praised Mukherjee’s ability to make complex oncology accessible without simplifying the science.

Fiction

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Gates’s fiction picks are rare, which makes this one significant. He described The Road as the kind of book that stays with you for years — a post-apocalyptic father-son story that is, at its core, about what we would sacrifice to protect the people we love. Gates read it during a period when he was thinking about existential risk and found its bleakness oddly clarifying.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gates has returned to Fitzgerald repeatedly in his reading recommendations. The Great Gatsby is the book he most frequently names when asked about fiction he has re-read — he finds Fitzgerald’s portrait of American wealth and its discontents more relevant with each re-read.

Climate and the Environment

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates

While Gates’s own book sits outside a reading list post in the obvious sense, it is worth noting that the books he read while researching it — including Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows — became some of his most enthusiastic recommendations. He spent several years immersed in energy and climate literature before writing it.

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

Gates called this “one of the most informative books I’ve read on the environment.” Kolbert traces humanity’s role in the current mass extinction event — visiting disappearing species worldwide — with rigour and controlled alarm. Gates has referenced it in multiple climate-related posts.

What Connects Gates’s Picks

Several patterns emerge across his reading over fifteen years:

Systems thinking. Gates consistently gravitates toward books that explain how complex systems work — whether economic systems, biological systems, or political ones. He is less interested in individual stories than in the mechanisms underneath them.

Evidence over ideology. Gates’s reading is empirical. He favours books backed by data and resists those built primarily on argument. This is why he gravitates toward scientists (Dawkins, Gawande, Diamond) as often as storytellers.

Long-term perspective. Almost every Gates recommendation operates on a timeline longer than a news cycle. Sapiens covers 70,000 years. Guns, Germs, and Steel covers centuries. The Warmth of Other Suns covers decades. Gates is training himself to think generationally.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often does Bill Gates publish reading recommendations?

Gates typically publishes two lists per year: a summer reading list in June or July, and a holiday reading list in November or December. He posts them on GatesNotes along with short essays on each book.

What is Bill Gates’s favourite book?

Gates has repeatedly named The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker as one of the most important books he has read. He has also consistently highlighted Being Mortal and Sapiens as books that changed how he thinks.

Does Bill Gates read fiction?

Yes, but less frequently than non-fiction. He tends to pick a single novel per list and reads it with clear intent — fiction picks are usually thematically connected to something he is thinking about, rather than purely recreational.

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