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6 books Bills Gates says you should read

Published: Oct 30, 2014 11:14 a.m. ET

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WSJ
Slide 1 of 8

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft and a giant foundation that aims to improve health care and reduce poverty.

His next project? Perhaps a book club.

The CEO-turned-philanthropist has recommended six books to read this summer. The list includes tomes on business, finance and Obamacare — as well as a romantic comedy that’s been called “funny, touching, and hard to put down.”

Gates hasn’t launched a full-fledged competitor to Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, the revamped organization run by a fellow billionaire. But for a few years now, he has been writing about what he thinks is worth reading.

Read on for his latest picks.

—Victor Reklaitis @vicrek

Simon & Schuster
Slide 2 of 8

A brilliant, hyper-logical guy who has trouble empathizing?

That’s the star of “The Rosie Project,” and it’s no surprise this particular character seemed to click with Gates, a computer genius who’s been criticized for his ruthlessness.

“Melinda thought I would appreciate the parts where he’s a little too obsessed with optimizing his schedule. She was right,” Gates said of this book on his Gates Notes blog.

The novel by Graeme Simsion tells the story of a genetics professor named Don Tillman who is surprised in his search for love. Melinda Gates apparently read the romantic comedy first, then recommended it to her husband, who has called it “one of the most enjoyable novels I’ve read in a long time.”

Simon & Schuster
Slide 3 of 8

Mergers create huge and powerful corporations, wars rage in distant lands and the gap between the rich and the poor grows.

“The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism” gets promoted as a look at an era with “unnervingly familiar headlines.”

Gates certainly finds lessons for today in this book by Doris Kearns Goodwin. He notes that Teddy Roosevelt needed the media to accomplish social change.

“Although he tried to push through a number of political reforms earlier in his career, he wasn’t really successful until journalists at McClure’s and other publications had rallied public support for change,” Gates wrote on his blog.

Weybright and Talley
Slide 4 of 8

“Business Adventures” by John Brooks drew all sorts of attention earlier this year after Gates described it as his favorite business book.

Warren Buffett recommended it to his friend back in 1991.

“A skeptic might wonder how this out-of-print collection of New Yorker articles from the 1960s could have anything to say about business today,” Gates wrote in an essay that ran in The Wall Street Journal and on MarketWatch.

“It’s certainly true that many of the particulars of business have changed. But the fundamentals have not.”

The book has since been republished.

Henry Holt and Co.
Slide 5 of 8

In this book, Elizabeth Kolbert makes the case that humans are bringing about the sixth extinction event in the Earth’s history.

“The story of the Sixth Extinction, at least as I’ve chosen to tell it, comes in thirteen chapters. Each tracks a species that’s in some way emblematic,” Kolbert writes in the prologue.

Gates has praised the author of “The Sixth Extinction” for not resorting to hype and providing a sobering, engaging and informative read.

Crown
Slide 6 of 8

Tim Geithner is seeking a bailout for his reputation in his new book, argues MarketWatch columnist David Weidner.

Gates is more sympathetic toward the former Treasury secretary, and he recommends reading Geithner’s book, “Stress Test: Reflections on the Financial Crisis,” that was published in May.

Weidner hopes for a day when people hurt by the crisis “will get their own book and speaking tour, not a guy, in part, responsible for it,” but Gates pats Geithner on the back.

“For all of Geithner’s actual or perceived mistakes and the horrible optics of bailouts and bonuses, he and his colleagues at Treasury and the Federal Reserve deserve credit for keeping the world economy from going over the cliff,” Gates wrote in a review on his blog.

PublicAffairs
Slide 7 of 8

Given that one criticism lobbed at Obamacare is its pages and pages of regulations, it may be no surprise that one of its creators, Ezekiel Emanuel, gets a bit wordy in the subtitle for his latest book, published earlier this year.

Emanuel’s book is “Reinventing American Health Care: How the Affordable Care Act will Improve our Terribly Complex, Blatantly Unjust, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly Inefficient, Error Prone System.”

In any case, Gates compliments Emanuel (brother of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel) for pointing out “a few things he disagreed with in Obamacare” and “making it clear when he’s educating you about the history of health care and when he’s advocating for his ideas.”

The Microsoft co-founder also tries to sound a bipartisan note in his writeup of this book on his blog. “The facts and history that Emanuel lays out would be useful to anyone involved in the debate over health care, no matter what their point of view is,” he says.

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