Bill Gates’ Reading List: What to Take From It and What to Leave

Bill Gates book recommendations arrive twice a year on Gates Notes, as a summer list and a holiday list that make up the Bill Gates reading list, with longer reviews in between. For an executive with four hours a week, the picks worth taking are the ones that explain how the world’s systems work and how real companies were built. The memoirs and most of the fiction can wait.

You have seen the list shared on LinkedIn by someone who has read none of it. You have opened the page, recognised two titles, added five to a cart, and received a box that sat on the hall table until the next list came out. Two of them were about tennis and American nurses in Vietnam, and you run a logistics business in Leeds.

Every title below comes from a Gates Notes page or from a named outlet quoting Gates directly. Where he is recommending as a philanthropist with a research staff and an open calendar, we say so. Where the book earns a place on an operator’s shelf, we say that too.

What the Bill Gates Reading List Actually Is

There is no single list. Gates publishes a short summer selection, usually four or five titles with one television series thrown in, and a holiday selection in December, with individual reviews between them. The holiday list for 2024 carried four books and a bonus, and he explained the thread himself: “Each book on my list this year is about making sense of the world around you.”

The lists are not a syllabus for running a company. They are the record of a very wealthy, very curious person trying to understand infrastructure, disease, energy, childhood and artificial intelligence in enough detail to put money behind an opinion. Some of that overlaps with what an executive needs.

The summer list for 2025 was five memoirs, chosen while he was finishing his own. The 2024 summer list mixed a war novel, a book on generosity, a book on AI in schools and David Brooks on how to listen to people. Over a few years the pattern settles: systems books, memoirs of people he admires, one or two novels, and whatever his foundation is working on that year.

The Selection, Grouped by What It Is For

Book	Author	What it is for	Read or skip for an executive
Business Adventures	John Brooks	How companies and markets actually behave under pressure	Read, first
Shoe Dog	Phil Knight	What building a company feels like from the inside	Read
Personal History	Katharine Graham	Leading an institution you did not expect to lead	Read if you inherited a role
How the World Really Works	Vaclav Smil	Energy, food, materials and the numbers behind them	Read, slowly
Factfulness	Hans Rosling, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund	Correcting the instincts that make you misjudge the world	Read in a weekend
Engineering in Plain Sight	Grady Hillhouse	Curiosity about the built environment	Skip unless you build things
The Coming Wave	Mustafa Suleyman	What AI and biotech do to society and to risk	Read the first half
Abundance	Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson	Why it is hard to build anything in rich countries	Read if policy touches your sector
Clearing the Air	Hannah Ritchie	A short, numerate guide to climate	Read if you report on emissions
The Anxious Generation	Jonathan Haidt	Phones and childhood	Skip for work, read as a parent
Brave New Words	Sal Khan	AI in education	Skip unless you sell to schools
Educated	Tara Westover	A memoir of leaving the world you were raised in	Skip for work, read for yourself
Born a Crime	Trevor Noah	A memoir of being an outsider	Skip for work
Surrender	Bono	A musician’s memoir	Skip
The Women	Kristin Hannah	A novel about army nurses in Vietnam	Holiday only
Remarkably Bright Creatures	Shelby Van Pelt	A novel narrated partly by an octopus	Holiday only

How the World Works: Smil, Rosling and the Infrastructure Book

The systems books are the strongest part of the Bill Gates reading list, and the part that looks most like homework. Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works is the clearest case. Gates calls Smil “one of my favorite authors” and says he has “learned more about energy and its impact on society from Vaclav than from any other single source.”

For an operator, this is the one that pays back fastest. Anyone who buys steel, diesel, fertiliser or electricity will read a chapter and then look at a supplier contract differently. Smil writes without a thesis to sell, and the book rewards the slow hour Gates describes rather than a skim on a flight.

Hans Rosling’s Factfulness is the companion. Gates called it “one of the most educational books I’ve ever read”, and the publisher pledged 5,000 copies to two reading charities alongside his review. The argument is that most educated people carry a picture of the world that is thirty years out of date, and the book lists ten instincts that keep it that way. The fear instinct, the gap instinct and the straight-line instinct show up in every board discussion of a new market.

Engineering in Plain Sight by Grady Hillhouse is the holiday pick Gates described as “the kind of read that will reward your curiosity”. It explains transformers, cell towers and the boxes on the pavement you walk past, and it belongs on his list rather than yours unless you build or maintain physical things. Curiosity is a fine reason to read it. Calling it professional development is a worse one.

Bill Gates Book Recommendations for Business and Leadership

Of all the Bill Gates book recommendations over the years, one has outlasted the rest. Business Adventures, a 1969 collection of John Brooks’s New Yorker pieces, was lent to him by Warren Buffett, and Gates wrote that “more than two decades after Warren lent it to me” it was still the best business book he had read.

It earns that status because it is reporting rather than advice. The Ford Edsel chapter is about how a company with every resource launched a product nobody wanted, because, as Gates put it, “Ford’s executives only pretended to be acting on what the polls said.” The Xerox chapter is about a company that sat on promising research because it did not look like the core business. There is no framework in any of it, which is why it is useful, and it sits well beside our guide to the Warren Buffett books worth a second read, since the two men have traded the same shelf for decades.

Shoe Dog is the other business title worth taking. Gates wrote that Phil Knight “opens up in a way few CEOs are willing to do” and is “amazingly honest about the accidental nature of his company’s success.” He also noted that the book offers no tips or checklists. Gates describes a business that was “constantly on life support” even as sales took off, with Knight going “on his knees to his bankers to beg for more credit” year after year. We have read nothing more accurate about early-stage stress tolerance, written by someone who lived it.

Gates also quotes Knight’s verdict on the whole ordeal: “God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing.” That line is the regret minimization framework Jeff Bezos later described, arrived at from the far end of the journey rather than the start. Bezos asked what his eighty-year-old self would regret. Knight got there and reported back.

Katharine Graham’s Personal History, from the 2025 summer list, is the leadership pick. Gates called it “a good reminder that great leaders can come from unexpected places.” Graham took over the Washington Post in 1963 after her husband’s death, at a time when, as Gates notes, few women held positions like it, and went on to stand up to President Nixon over the paper’s reporting on Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. Anyone who stepped into a role through succession rather than ambition will recognise the first half of the book.

One caution. Gates often reads as the friend of the author. Graham was a friend, Buffett lent him the Brooks, and the 2025 memoirs were chosen while he wrote his own. That is a fine way to choose books, and a different test from the one behind our list of the best books for entrepreneurs, which asks what will change a decision next quarter.

Science, Technology and the Foundation’s Agenda

Gates described Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave as the best explanation of how AI and gene editing will reshape society, adding that “if you want to understand the rise of AI, this is the best book to read.” Suleyman co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and has run Microsoft AI since 2024, so the recommendation sits close to home. The first half, on why these technologies are hard to contain, is worth any executive’s time. The second half is policy.

Hannah Ritchie’s Clearing the Air is the short one. Gates wrote that he “loved this clear-eyed guide to global warming”, and the appeal for a business reader is that Ritchie, deputy editor at Our World in Data, writes in numbers rather than mood. If your company reports on emissions, it is the fastest route to a sensible conversation about them.

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, on his recent reviews page, is for anyone whose projects depend on planning, permitting or public procurement. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and Sal Khan’s Brave New Words are on the lists because of what the Gates Foundation cares about, which is children and schools. Gates recommended Haidt to anyone who raises, works with or teaches young people, and called Khan’s book one he could not recommend enough. Neither is a work book unless you sell to schools or parents, and treating them as one is how a reading list turns into a stack.

The Memoirs and Fiction He Liked

The 2025 summer list is five memoirs: Graham, Nicholas Kristof’s Chasing Hope, Tara Westover’s Educated, Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime and Bono’s Surrender. Gates says a 1997 Kristof article changed the course of his life, and that Bono’s openness was “a great model for how I could be open about my own challenges” in his own memoir. Those are personal reasons, stated as such.

Educated is the one of the five most likely to be on your shelf already, half read. It is a remarkable book about leaving the world you were raised in, and for most executives a book for a holiday rather than a Tuesday. Born a Crime can be read in two sittings. Surrender is for people who like U2.

On fiction, Gates has praised Kristin Hannah’s The Women as “a beautifully written tribute to a group of veterans who deserve more appreciation”, and described Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures as “the perfect way to start my next decade of life.” Neither will change how you run anything, and he never claimed they would.

Roughly half of what Gates recommends in a given year is chosen for pleasure, friendship or his foundation’s agenda, and he labels it honestly. The mistake is on the reader’s side, in treating the whole list as a prescription.

How Gates Reads, and What an Operator Can Borrow

The reading method is more transferable than the reading list. In 2017 Gates described four habits that Inc. collected under four headings: make notes in the margins, finish what you start, use the format you are comfortable with, and block out at least an hour. On the last he was blunt: “This is not the kind of thing you can do five minutes here, 10 minutes there.”

The margin notes are the habit worth stealing first. Gates says the writing keeps him concentrating and ties what he is reading to what he already knows, and that matches what we found when we looked at the evidence on how to remember things quickly. Retrieval and elaboration beat rereading. A pencil in the book is the cheapest form of both.

The hour block is the second, the reading equivalent of the slow start Jeff Bezos has described, which we took apart in our piece on Jeff Bezos’s morning routine. Both protect a stretch of time before the day starts spending you. Gates takes the idea to its extreme twice a year with his think week, a week alone with a stack of material and no meetings. Most people cannot do the week. Almost anyone can do the hour.

Finishing every book is the rule we would not borrow. For a reader with four hours a week, a rule that forces you through the second half of a book whose argument landed in the first third costs you two other books. Read the opening third properly, decide whether the rest earns its place, and leave without guilt if it does not. Our guide on how to read more books while running a business makes the same case from the other direction.

Four Hours a Week: Which Picks Are for You

Call four hours a week a serious non-fiction book every fortnight. That is about twenty-five books a year, and the sixteen titles in the table above would take most of it. Nobody with a company to run can read the Bill Gates reading list whole. So choose by situation.

If you are building something and the numbers are tight, read Shoe Dog and Business Adventures, in that order, and nothing else from the list until the quarter is over. If you are two years from an exit, Business Adventures again, then our guide on how to sell a small business, because the Brooks chapters on how buyers and markets behave under pressure are the closest thing on his list to preparation for a sale.

If you inherited a role, or were promoted past where you expected to land, read Graham. If your sector depends on energy, materials or public permission to build, read Smil, then Abundance. If your team keeps misjudging a new market, hand them Factfulness. If you are weighing formal study instead, such as an executive MBA, a year of reading from this list costs far less and is worth trying first. And if a new offer is on the table, read the fine print of the compensation package before any book.

Leave the memoirs, the novels and the education books for holidays, and feel no obligation to them at all. A billionaire’s list reflects a billionaire’s situation, in the same way that the figures in our piece on net worth by age say more about stage of life than about merit. Gates reads for a foundation with a global remit. You read for a company with a payroll on the 28th.

The last thing to borrow is the habit of writing the list down. Gates publishes his. The private version is a line in your productivity plan naming the next two books and the hour each week they get, so the box on the hall table turns into something read. The productivity books we rank elsewhere earn their place on the same terms, one idea applied before the next is opened.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where does Bill Gates publish his reading list?

On his own site, Gates Notes, as a summer list and a holiday list each year, with individual book reviews posted in between. Each pick comes with a short explanation of why he chose it, which is the quickest way to decide whether it is for you.

Which book on the Bill Gates reading list should an executive read first?

Business Adventures by John Brooks. Gates has called it the best business book he has read, it was lent to him by Warren Buffett, and it is reporting on real companies rather than a framework. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight is the natural second, and Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works is the one to read slowly if your business touches energy or materials.

How does Bill Gates read so many books?

By his own account, in blocks of at least an hour, with notes in the margins, and by finishing every book he starts. He has said scattered five-minute sessions do not work for serious reading. The hour and the margin notes transfer to anyone. The finish-everything rule suits his time and pace; most working readers do better reading the first third well and deciding from there.

Read the parts of this list that look like your life, and let the rest be his.