Every December for years now, I clear a little space on my nightstand because I know one thing is coming: the Bill Gates holiday book list. There’s something oddly comforting about a billionaire philanthropist who still gets genuinely excited about reading. And this year—his 70th on the planet—the selection feels especially personal, almost like he’s handing us the books that helped him make sense of getting older, of climate anxiety, of why the world feels stuck, and what still gives him hope.
I’ve been waiting for this drop the way some people wait for holiday movies. When it finally landed, I wasn’t disappointed. Five books, wildly different from one another, yet somehow all circling the same quiet question: how do things actually work—people, societies, progress, purpose? Let’s dive in.
The Five Books Bill Gates Wants You to Read Right Now
A Novel That Stars the Wisest Octopus You’ll Ever Meet
First up is the one that surprised pretty much everyone: a work of fiction. After years of mostly recommending heavy nonfiction, he went all-in on Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures. And honestly? I get it the second I heard the premise.
Picture this: a giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus, trapped in a small-town aquarium, narrates parts of the story. He’s sarcastic, brilliant, and—because octopuses have neurons in their arms—basically a distributed genius who’s tired of dumb humans. His only real friend? Tova, a 70-year-old widow who cleans the aquarium at night and is quietly coming apart after losing her husband and son.
I know, I know—it sounds almost too quirky. But the way Van Pelt weaves loneliness, grief, and late-life connection is devastating in the best way. Gates wrote that he saw himself in Tova: someone entering a new chapter, wondering how to fill the days, how to matter when the old roles are gone. For a man who has said retirement “sounds awful,” that hits hard.
“Van Pelt’s story made me think about the challenge of filling the days after you stop working—and what communities can do to help older people find purpose.”
– Bill Gates
If you, like me, have parents or grandparents who suddenly seem a little lost now that the kids are gone and the career is winding down, this book will wreck you gently. It’s funny, warm, and somehow makes an octopus the emotional center of gravity. Perfect holiday escape that still leaves you thoughtful.
The Climate Book That Refuses to Panic
Next is the one a lot of us probably need right now: Clearing the Air by Hannah Ritchie. If you’ve ever doom-scrolled climate headlines and felt your soul leave your body, this is the antidote.
Ritchie, an Oxford data scientist, takes the fifty most common climate worries—Is renewable energy too expensive? Are we past the point of no return? Should I just give up and move to the woods?—and answers them with numbers instead of nightmares. Gates calls it “one of the clearest explanations of the climate challenge” he’s ever read.
Here’s the thing: progress is actually happening faster than most people realize. Solar is now the cheapest electricity in history. Wind is crushing it in places you wouldn’t expect. Electric vehicle adoption curves look like smartphone adoption did fifteen years ago. None of this means we’re “saved,” but it does mean the doomsday framing might be distracting us from finishing the job.
In my experience, hope is a better motivator than guilt. Ritchie’s book hands you realistic hope backed by graphs you can actually understand. If you’ve got a teenager who’s anxious about the planet, put this in their stocking. It might just give them permission to fight instead of despair.
A Media Titan Finally Tells His Whole Story
Barry Diller’s memoir Who Knew is the kind of book you stay up late reading because every page has a “wait, HE did that?” moment.
We’re talking the guy who basically invented the made-for-TV movie, green-lit the miniseries format, built Fox into a fourth network, then jumped early into the internet and turned a tiny travel site into Expedia. Gates and Diller have been friends forever, and even he says the book surprised him.
What I loved most, though, is how raw Diller gets about his personal life. At 83 he came out publicly as gay, something he’d kept private for decades in an industry that wasn’t always kind. The honesty about ambition, regret, love, and identity makes this far more than a business tell-all.
If you’re fascinated by how creative industries actually evolve—or just enjoy watching a brilliant mind piece together a wild life—this one’s pure pleasure.
The Psychology Book That Explains Why We All Pretend
Steven Pinker’s latest, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, has maybe the most academic title on the list, but don’t let that scare you. It’s actually about something we do every single day: navigate common knowledge.
You know that awkward moment when everyone in a meeting knows the boss’s idea is terrible, but nobody says it because nobody else has said it yet? That’s lack of common knowledge killing progress. Pinker unpacks how this invisible force shapes conversations, revolutions, dating, cancel culture—literally everything human.
Gates says it made him see everyday interactions in a new light, and I had the same reaction. Suddenly I understood why some arguments online feel impossible to resolve, why certain social norms persist long after they stop making sense, and why a single brave voice can sometimes change everything.
It’s dense in spots, sure, but Pinker writes like your smartest friend who refuses to talk down to you. Worth the brain workout.
The Book That Diagnoses Why America Stopped Building
Finally, the one that’s probably going to spark the most arguments at holiday dinners: Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
The core thesis is brutal in its simplicity: America used to be really good at building stuff—bridges, houses, power plants, laboratories—and now we’re… not. The book walks through housing shortages, stalled infrastructure, slow vaccine factories, you name it. Their culprit? A thicket of regulations, environmental review processes, and local veto points that make every project take forever and cost ten times more than it should.
Gates has seen the same bottlenecks in global health—trying to get a better toilet design approved in some countries can take longer than inventing it in the first place. He doesn’t agree with every prescription in the book, but he thinks they’re asking exactly the right questions.
“Sometimes the science itself is hard. But often, the logistics and execution are even harder.”
– Bill Gates
Love it or hate it, Abundance forces you to confront a uncomfortable truth: wanting progress isn’t enough. We have to actually let people build.
So there you have it—five books that somehow manage to entertain, challenge, comfort, and provoke all at once. An octopus who understands grief better than most people. A climate scientist who refuses to let us give up. A media pioneer who lived big and told the truth late. A psychologist decoding the unspoken rules we all follow. And two journalists daring us to imagine an America that builds again.
I don’t know about you, but my holiday reading stack just grew dangerously tall. And I’m not even mad about it. Because if a 70-year-old billionaire still gets this excited about books, maybe the rest of us can afford to slow down, turn off the noise, and read something that might just change how we see the world.
Happy holidays—and happy reading.
