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While Bill Gates has a schedule that's planned down to the minute, the entrepreneur-turned-billionaire-humanitarian still gobbles up about a book a week.
Aside from a handful of novels, they're mostly nonfiction books covering his and his foundation's broad range of interests. A lot of them are about transforming systems: how nations can intelligently develop, how to lead an organization, and how social change can fruitfully happen.
We went through the past four years of his book criticism to find the ones that he gave glowing reviews and that changed his perspective.
Warren Buffett and Gates have a famously epic bromance, what with their recommending books to each other and spearheading philanthropic campaigns together.
So it's no surprise that Gates enjoyed "Tap Dancing To Work," a collection of articles and essays about and by Buffett, compiled by Fortune magazine journalist Carol Loomis.
Gates says that anyone who reads the book cover-to-cover will walk away with two main impressions:
First, how Warren's been incredibly consistent in applying his vision and investment principles over the duration of his career;
... [S]econdly, that his analysis and understanding of business and markets remains unparalleled. I wrote in 1996 that I'd never met anyone who thought about business in such a clear way. That is certainly still the case.
Getting into the mind of Buffett is "an extremely worthwhile use of time," Gates concludes.
Gates says his favorite author is Vaclav Smil, an environmental sciences professor who writes big histories of things like energy and innovation.
His latest is "Making the Modern World." It got Gates thinking.
"It might seem mundane, but the issue of materials — how much we use and how much we need — is key to helping the world’s poorest people improve their lives," he writes. "Think of the amazing increase in quality of life that we saw in the United States and other rich countries in the past 100 years. We want most of that miracle to take place for all of humanity over the next 50 years."
To know where we're going, Gates says, we need to know where we've been — and Smil is one of his favorite sources for learning that.
It can be easy to forget that our present day is a part of world history. Gates says that New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert's new book "The Sixth Extinction" helps correct that.
"Humans are putting down massive amounts of pavement, moving species around the planet, over-fishing and acidifying the oceans, changing the chemical composition of rivers, and more," Gates writes, echoing a concern that he voices in many of his reviews.
"Natural scientists posit that there have been five extinction events in the Earth’s history (think of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs)," he continues, "and Kolbert makes a compelling case that human activity is leading to the sixth."
To get a hint of Kolbert's reporting, check out the series of stories that preceded the book's publication.
Gates stood at the center of an enormously complex system as the CEO of Microsoft. Timothy Geithner did much the same as US Treasury Secretary — and saw the structure fall down around him during the financial crisis.
"Geithner paints a compelling human portrait of what it was like to be fighting a global financial meltdown while at the same time fighting critics inside and outside the Administration as well as his own severe guilt over his near-total absence from his family," Gates says. "The politics of fighting financial crises will always be ugly. But it helps if the public knows a little more about the subject."
"Stress Test" provides that knowledge.
In "Better Angels," Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker branches out into the history of the most contentious of subjects: violence.
Gates says it's one of the most important books he's ever read.
"Pinker presents a tremendous amount of evidence that humans have gradually become much less violent and much more humane," he says, in a trend that started thousands of years ago and continued until this day.
This isn't just ivory-tower theory. Gates says the book has affected his humanitarian work.
"As I'm someone who’s fairly optimistic in general," he says, "the book struck a chord with me and got me to thinking about some of our foundation's strategies."