Bill Gates believes that cold weather and the quiet rhythm of the holiday season offer the perfect moment to return to the habit he values most: reading. In a new post on his personal platform, the Microsoft co-founder shared his annual list of recommended books, noting that “the calm days of the holidays make it easy to sit down with a good book.”
His selections this year span fiction, psychology, climate science, political thought and media history, reflecting a broad curiosity and a growing focus on understanding how societies communicate, innovate and confront global challenges.
Gates says this season’s choices are united by a single idea: each book reveals “something important about how we live our lives, how we search for purpose later in life, how we understand climate change, how creative industries evolve, how humans communicate, and why America has struggled to deliver major projects.”
His list opens with Shelby Van Pelt’s 2022 novel Remarkably Bright Creatures, a story that instantly caught his attention for its unusual perspective.
Part of the narrative is told through the eyes of Marcellus, a highly observant octopus living in an aquarium, whose connection with a seventy-year-old widow working the night shift becomes the emotional heart of the book. Gates says the novel’s reflections on loneliness and the search for meaning after retirement made him reconsider the challenges many older adults face and the role communities must play in supporting them.
His second pick, Clearing the Air by Hannah Ritchie, offers what Gates describes as the clearest explanation he has read on the climate crisis.
Structured around fifty core questions, the book addresses everything from renewable energy to the realistic limits of warming mitigation, avoiding the doom-laden tone that often dominates environmental debate. Gates praises Ritchie for grounding her analysis in data rather than pessimism, noting that her evidence-based approach highlights genuine progress while maintaining a sober sense of risk.
The list then moves into the world of media with Barry Diller’s memoir Who Knew, a sweeping recount of the industry titan’s decisive influence on television and the early internet. Although Gates is a longtime friend of Diller, he says the book introduced him to chapters of the media mogul’s life he had never known, stories stretching from the invention of made-for-TV movies to bold early bets on digital platforms that would help redefine the modern entertainment landscape.
In When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker unpacks the power of shared knowledge and how it shapes communication, cooperation and social behavior. Gates describes the book as surprisingly accessible despite the complexity of the topic and says it reshaped the way he interprets everyday interactions.
Understanding how common knowledge reinforces trust and collaboration, he argues, is essential for navigating both personal and professional relationships.
The final title on his list, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, examines why the United States, despite its immense wealth and engineering capacity, struggles to build major infrastructure or implement ambitious innovations.
The authors argue that outdated regulations and bureaucratic delays have become significant barriers to national progress, and they propose an “agenda of abundance” aimed at restoring America’s ability to deliver large-scale projects. Gates acknowledges that the book does not offer every solution, but he believes it raises the right questions and highlights the institutional hurdles that also appear in global health efforts.
Together, the five books reflect Gates’s growing interest in the systems that shape human behavior, global development and public policy. More importantly, they serve as his reminder that a quiet holiday season remains one of the best invitations to step back, pick up a book, and reconsider the world with fresh insight.
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