Look out, Oprah: A new Books section of Bill Gates’ website, The Gates Notes, offers a glimpse of some of his favorite books and recent reads, and invites readers of the site to share their thoughts.
“I love to read, in fact I read all the time,” writes Gates in a post introducing the ‘Gates Notes Bookshelf’. “And I’m always sharing with others the really good books that I have read, ones that have just given me a lot of personal pleasure as well as books that make a contribution to our understanding of important topics, like education, energy, development and health.”
The section collects the book reviews that Gates has published on his site since it launched in January 2010. It also includes a bunch of titles that have been added to the site in just the past few days.
Here’s a sampling of those …
- Enriching the Earth: Fritz Habery, Carol Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production
- Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age
- Open: An Autobiography (Andre Agassi)
- Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
- Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School
- The Feynman Lectures On Physics, Vols. 1-3
- Physics for Dummies
- Mountains Beyond Mountains (the story of Paul Farmer)
- The Man Who Fed the World: Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug and His Battle to End World Hunger
- A Separate Peace, by John Knowles (one of the few novels on the list).
- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
- Showing up for Life (by his dad, Bill Gates, Sr.)
- The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
- Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves
- Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger
- Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years
- The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics and Change
- Energies: An Illustrated Guide to the Biosphere and Civilization
- Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns
- Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present
See this page for the full list, including titles previously reviewed by Gates. It may seem like a lot already, but Gates says in his introductory post that the list will be expanded over time.