The holidays are almost here. I always love taking advantage of this time of year to catch up on reading, and I know a lot of people feel the same way. There’s something about the quieter days around the holidays that makes it easier to sit down with a good book. So I’m sharing a few recent favorites.

Each of these books pulls back the curtain on how something important really works: how people find purpose later in life, how we should think about climate change, how creative industries evolve, how humans communicate, and how America lost its capacity to build big things—and how to get it back.

I hope you find something here that sparks your curiosity. And I hope your holiday season is filled with happy loved ones, good food, and great conversation.

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. I don't read fiction often, but when I do, I want to read about interesting characters who help me see the world in a new way. Remarkably Bright Creatures delivered on that front. I loved this terrific novel about Tova, a 70-year-old woman who works night shifts cleaning an aquarium and finds fulfillment caring for a clever octopus. Tova struggles to find meaning in her life, which is something a lot of people deal with as they get older. 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.

Clearing the Air by Hannah Ritchie. I’ve followed Hannah’s work at Our World in Data for years, and her new book is one of the clearest explanations of the climate challenge I’ve read. She structures it around 50 big questions—like whether it’s too late to act, whether nuclear power is dangerous, and whether renewables really are affordable—and answers each one in concise, accessible language. She’s realistic about the risks but grounded in data that shows real progress: Solar and wind are growing at record speed, electric cars are getting cheaper, and innovation is accelerating across areas like steel, cement, and clean fuels. If you want a hopeful, fact-driven overview of where climate solutions stand, this is a great pick.

Who Knew by Barry Diller. I’ve known Barry for decades, but his memoir still surprised and taught me a lot. He’s one of the most influential figures in modern media. He invented the made-for-TV movie, helped create the TV miniseries, built Paramount into the #1 film studio, launched the Fox broadcast network, and later assembled an internet empire. He’s spent his life betting on ideas before they were obvious, and the industries he’s transformed show how much those bets can pay off.

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows by Steven Pinker. Few people explain the mysteries of human behavior better than Steven Pinker, and his latest book is a must-read for anyone who wants to learn more about how people communicate. When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows shows how “common knowledge” lets people coordinate: When we know what others know, indirect signals become clear. Although the topic itself is pretty complicated, the book is readable and practical, and it made me see everyday social interactions in a new light.

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. This book is a sharp look at why America seems to struggle to build things and what it will take to fix that. Klein and Thompson argue that progress depends not just on good ideas but on the systems that help ideas spread. Today, these systems often slow things down instead—from housing and infrastructure to clean energy and scientific breakthroughs. I recognized many of the bottlenecks they describe from my own work in global health and climate. Abundance doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but it asks the right questions about how the U.S. can rebuild our capacity to get big things done.

I was twenty when I gave my first public speech. It was 1976, Microsoft was almost a year old, and I was explaining software to a room of a few hundred computer hobbyists. My main memory of that time at the podium was how nervous I felt. In the half century since, I’ve spoken to many thousands of people and gotten very comfortable delivering thoughts on any number of topics, from software to work being done in global health, climate change, and the other issues I regularly write about here on Gates Notes.

One thing that isn’t on that list: myself. In the fifty years I’ve been in the public eye, I’ve rarely spoken or written about my own story or revealed details of my personal life. That wasn’t just out of a preference for privacy. By nature, I tend to focus outward. My attention is drawn to new ideas and people that help solve the problems I’m working on. And though I love learning history, I never spent much time looking at my own.  

But like many people my age—I’ll turn 70 this year—several years ago I started a period of reflection. My three children were well along their own paths in life. I’d witnessed the slow decline and death of my father from Alzheimer’s. I began digging through old photographs, family papers, and boxes of memorabilia, such as school reports my mother had saved, as well as printouts of computer code I hadn't seen in decades. I also started sitting down to record my memories and got help gathering stories from family members and old friends. It was the first time I made a concerted effort to try to see how all the memories from long ago might give insight into who I am now.

The result of that process is a book that will be published on Feb. 4: my first memoir, Source Code. You can order it here. (I’m donating my proceeds from the book to the United Way.)

Source Code is the story of the early part of my life, from growing up in Seattle through the beginnings of Microsoft. I share what it was like to be a precocious, sometimes difficult kid, the restless middle child of two dedicated and ambitious parents who didn’t always know what to make of me. In writing the book I came to better understand the people that shaped me and the experiences that led to the creation of a world-changing company.

In Source Code you’ll learn about how Paul Allen and I came to realize that software was going to change the world, and the moment in December 1974 when he burst into my college dorm room with the issue of Popular Electronics that would inspire us to drop everything and start our company. You’ll also meet my extended family, like the grandmother who taught me how to play cards and, along the way, how to think. You’ll meet teachers, mentors, and friends who challenged me and helped propel me in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until much later. 

Some of the moments that I write about, like that Popular Electronics story, are ones I’ve always known were important in my life. But with many of the most personal moments, I only saw how important they were when I considered them from my perspective now, decades later. Writing helped me see the connection between my early interests and idiosyncrasies and the work I would do at Microsoft and even the Gates Foundation.

Some of the stories in the book were hard for me to tell. I was a kid who was out of step with most of my peers, happier reading on my own than doing almost anything else. I was tough on my parents from a very early age. I wanted autonomy and resisted my mother’s efforts to control me. A therapist back then helped me see that I would be independent soon enough and should end the battle that I was waging at home. Part of growing up was understanding certain aspects of myself and learning to handle them better. It’s an ongoing process.

One of the most difficult parts of writing Source Code was revisiting the death of my first close friend when I was 16. He was brilliant, mature beyond his years, and, unlike most people in my life at the time, he understood me. It was my first experience with death up close, and I’m grateful I got to spend time processing the memories of that tragedy.

The need to look into myself to write Source Code was a new experience for me. The deeper I got, the more I enjoyed parsing my past. I’ll continue this journey and plan to cover my software career in a future book, and eventually I’ll write one about my philanthropic work. As a first step, though, I hope you enjoy Source Code.

I feel like I’m always learning, but I really go into serious learning mode when I’m starting a new project. In the early days of Microsoft, I read a ton about technology companies, and as I was starting the Gates Foundation, I researched the history of American philanthropy.

Writing my memoir Source Code, which came out earlier this year, was no different: I thought about what I could draw on from the best memoirs I’ve read.

So for this year’s Summer Books, I want to share a few of them. With the exception of Nicholas Kristof’s Chasing Hope, I read all of these before finishing Source Code—in fact I read Katharine Graham’s Personal History years before I even decided to start writing. (Nick’s book is so good that I wanted to share it anyway.)

You won’t find a direct correlation between any of these books and Source Code. But I think it has shades of Bono’s vulnerability about his own challenges, Tara Westover’s evolving view of her parents, and Trevor Noah’s sense as a kid that he didn’t quite fit in.

In any case, I hope you can find something that interests you on this list. Memoirs are a good reminder that people have countless interesting stories to tell about their lives.

Personal History, by Katharine Graham. I met Kay Graham, the legendary publisher of the Washington Post, on July 5, 1991—the same day I met Warren Buffett—and we became good friends. I loved hearing Kay talk about her remarkable life: taking over the Post at a time when few women were in leadership positions like that, standing up to President Nixon to protect the paper’s reporting on Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, negotiating the end to a pressman’s strike, and much more. This thoughtful memoir is a good reminder that great leaders can come from unexpected places.

Chasing Hope, by Nicholas Kristof. In 1997, Nick Kristof wrote an article that changed the course of my life. It was about the huge number of children in poor countries who were dying from diarrhea—and it helped me decide what I wanted to focus my philanthropic giving on. I’ve been following Nick’s work ever since, and we’ve stayed in touch. He’s reported from more than 150 countries, covering war, poverty, health, and human rights. In this terrific memoir, Nick writes about how he stays optimistic about the world despite everything he’s seen. His book made me think: The world would be better off with more Nick Kristofs.

Educated, by Tara Westover. Tara grew up in a Mormon survivalist home in rural Idaho, raised by parents who believed that doomsday was coming and that the family should interact with the outside world as little as possible. Eventually she broke away from her parents—a process that felt like a much more extreme version of what I went through as a kid, and what I think a lot of people go through: At some point in your childhood, you go from thinking your parents know everything to seeing them as adults with limitations. Tara beautifully captures that process of self-discovery in this unforgettable memoir.

Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah. Back in 2017, I said this memoir shows how the former Daily Show host’s “approach has been honed over a lifetime of never quite fitting in.” I also grew up feeling like I didn’t quite fit in at times, although Trevor has a much stronger claim to the phrase than I do. He was a biracial child in apartheid South Africa, a country where mixed-race relationships were forbidden. He was, as the title says, “born a crime.” In this book, and in his comedy, Trevor uses his outside perspective to his advantage. His outlook transcends borders.

Surrender, by Bono. I’m lucky that my parents were super supportive of my interest in computers—but Bono’s parents had a very different view of his passion for singing. He says his parents basically ignored him, which made him try even harder to get their attention. “The lack of interest of my father … in his son’s voice is not easy to explain, but it might have been crucial.” Bono shows a lot of vulnerability in this surprisingly open memoir, writing about his “need to be needed” and how he learned he’ll never fill his emotional needs by playing for huge crowds. It was a great model for how I could be open about my own challenges in Source Code.

In the introduction to his latest book, How to Feed the World, Vaclav Smil writes that “numbers are the antidote to wishful thinking.” That one line captures why I’ve been such a devoted reader of this curmudgeonly Canada-based Czech academic for so many years. Across his decades of research and writing, Vaclav has tackled some of the biggest questions in energy, agriculture, and public health—not by making grand predictions, but by breaking down complex problems into measurable data.

Now, in How to Feed the World, Vaclav applies that same approach to one of the most pressing issues of our time: ensuring that everyone has enough nutritious food to eat. Many discussions about feeding the world focus on increasing agricultural productivity through improved seeds, healthier soils, better farming practices, and more productive livestock (all priorities for the Gates Foundation). Vaclav, however, insists we already produce more than enough food to feed the world. The real challenge, he says, is what happens after the food is grown.

This kind of argument is classic Vaclav—questioning assumptions, forcing us to rethink the way we frame problems, and turning conventional wisdom on its head. His analysis is never about the best- or worst-case scenarios; it’s about what the numbers actually tell us.

And the numbers tell a striking story: Some of the world’s biggest food producers have the highest rates of undernourishment. Globally, we produce around 3,000 calories per person per day—more than enough to feed everyone—but a staggering one-third of all food is wasted. (In some rich countries, that figure climbs to 45 percent.) Distribution systems fail, economic policies backfire, and food doesn’t always go where it’s needed.

I’ve seen this firsthand through the Gates Foundation’s work in sub-Saharan Africa, where food insecurity is driven by low agricultural productivity and weak infrastructure. Yields in the region remain far lower than in Asia or Latin America, in part because farmers rely on rain-fed agriculture rather than irrigation and have limited access to fertilizers, quality seeds, and digital farming tools. But even when food is grown, getting it to market is another challenge. Poor roads drive up transport costs, inadequate storage leads to food going bad, and weak trade networks make nutritious food unaffordable for many families.

And access is only part of the problem. Even when people get enough calories, they’re often missing the right nutrients. Malnutrition remains one of the most critical challenges the foundation works on—and it’s more complex than eating enough food. While severe hunger has declined globally, micronutrient deficiencies remain stubbornly common, even in wealthy countries. One of the most effective solutions has been around for nearly a century: food fortification. In the U.S., flour has been fortified with iron and vitamin B since the 1940s. This simple step has helped prevent conditions like anemia and neural tube defects and improve public health at scale—close to vaccines in terms of lives improved per dollar spent.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is Vaclav’s exploration of how human diets evolved. Across civilizations, people independently discovered that pairing grains with legumes created complete protein profiles—whether it was rice and soybeans in Asia, wheat and lentils in India, or corn and beans in the Americas. These solutions emerged from practical experience long before modern science could explain why they worked so well.

But just as past generations adapted their diets to available resources, we’re now facing new challenges that require us to adapt in different ways. Technology and innovation can help. They’ve already transformed the way we produce food, and they’ll continue to play a role. Take aquaculture: Once a tiny industry, it’s grown over the past 40 years to supply more seafood for the world than traditional fishing—a scalable way to meet global protein demands. The Green Revolution is another example. Beginning in the 1960s, innovations in higher-yielding crops, more effective fertilizers, and modern irrigation prevented widespread famine in India and Mexico. These changes were once seen as unlikely, too.

New breakthroughs could drive even more progress. CRISPR gene editing, for instance, could help develop crops that are more resilient to drought, disease, and pests—critical for farmers facing the pressures of climate change. Vaclav warns that we can’t count on technological miracles alone, and I agree. But I also believe that breakthroughs like CRISPR could be game-changing, just as the Green Revolution once was. The key is balancing long-term innovation with practical solutions we can implement immediately.

And some of these solutions aren’t about producing more food at all—they’re about wasting less of what we already have. Better storage and packaging, smarter supply chains, and flexible pricing models could significantly reduce spoilage and excess inventory. In a conversation we had about the book, Vaclav pointed out that Costco (which might seem like the pinnacle of U.S. consumption) stocks fewer than 4,000 items, compared to 40,000-plus in a typical North American supermarket.

That kind of efficiency—focusing on fewer, high-turnover products—reduces waste, lowers costs, and ultimately eases pressure on global food supply, helping make food more affordable where it is needed most.

How to Feed the World had a lot to teach me—and I’m sure it will teach you a lot, too. Like all of Vaclav’s best books, it challenges readers to think differently about a problem we thought we understood. Growing more and better food remains crucial—especially in places like sub-Saharan Africa, where there simply isn’t enough. But as the world’s population approaches 10 billion, increasing agricultural productivity alone won’t solve hunger and malnutrition. We also need to ensure that food is more accessible and affordable, less wasted, and just as nutritious as it is abundant.

After all, the goal isn’t to make more food for its own sake—it’s to feed more people.