Topline
Billionaire Bill Gates chose five books that “pull back the curtain on how something important really works” in his annual list of holiday reading recommendations that include works of fiction, science, memoir and politics.
Bill gates with his 2025 holiday book recommendations.
Gates Notes
Key Facts
The five books he recommends are: “Remarkably Bright Creatures” by Shelby Van Pelt, “Clearing the Air” by Hannah Ritchie, “Who Knew” by Barry Diller, “When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows” by Steven Pinker and “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson .“
Remarkably Bright Creatures,” a novel that spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list with a Netflix adaptation expected next year, is the story of a widow who forms an unlikely friendship with a Pacific octopus.
Gates, 70, said the book “helped me make a bit more sense out of aging” and called it “the perfect way to start my next decade of life.”
“When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows” by psychologist Pinker dissects how common knowledge, or knowing what other people know, changes social dynamics, opens up lines of communication and “props up every conversation we have,” per Gates’ review.
Data scientist Ritchie answers 50 pressing questions about climate change in “Clearing the Air,” while Diller’s book, in which the Hollywood big wig publicly comes out as gay and says his sexuality did not conflict with his marriage to Diane von Fürstenberg, is a memoir Gates called “raw and honest in a way most business memoirs usually aren’t.”
The final recommendation, “Abundance,” is about how revamping economic, political and regulatory systems would allow America to better build infrastructure, particularly for energy and transportation.
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Key Background
Gates has been publishing recommendations of books, songs and shows usually twice a year, at the start of summer and near the holidays for the past 15 years. Some of Gates’ recommendations, even those not included on his yearly lists, have influenced the book market. Most notably, his 2012 endorsement of Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature’s Nature,” which came in a tweet, led to a 2,000% increase of sales and launched it to No. 2 on Amazon’s bestseller list. In the summer of 2014, Gates wrote a blog post about the 1969 book “Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street” by John Brooks after it was recommended to him by fellow billionaire Warren Buffet. The book had fallen out of bookstores by then, but Gates’ recommendation led to it being published as an e-book for the first time, and it became No. 5 on Amazon’s list of Kindle sales. Gates usually recommends books he’s read over the previous 12 months, though in the holiday season of 2022, he recommended four of his favorite books of all time: “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein, “Surrender” by Bono, “The Inner Game of Tennis” by Timothy Gallwey and “Mendeleyev’s Dream” by Paul Strathern.
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2025/11/25/heres-what-bill-gates-recommends-you-read-this-holiday-season/
