Bill Gates shared his holiday reading list for 2024 on his blog, Gates Notes.
The Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist selected four titles, along with one bonus pick, for this year’s list. The four main books, Gates writes, “are, in one way or another, about making sense of the world around you.”
Gates recommended Doris Kearns Goodwin’s An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, writing, “Doris is such a talented writer that the chapters about her love story are just as engaging and enlightening as the chapters about the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War.”
He also gave a shoutout to The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma, written by Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar, saying the authors give “the best explanation I’ve seen yet of how artificial intelligence—along with other scientific advances, like gene editing—is poised to reshape every aspect of society.”
Also making Gates’ list were Grady Hillhouse’s Engineering in Plain Sight: An Illustrated Field Guide to the Constructed Environment, which he said “will reward your curiosity and answer questions you didn’t even know you had,” and Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, which he called a “must-read for anyone raising, working with, or teaching young people today.”
Gates’ bonus pick was Doris Henkel’s Federer, which he called a “wonderful retrospective” of the life and career of tennis legend Roger Federer.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
