The best books of 2019: five picks by Bill Gates, including An American Marriage – also a Barack Obama pick

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft Corporation, has released a list of his top five favourite books from 2019. The titles, which address everything from sleep to the United States criminal justice system, are fairly conventional, but he’s a billionaire so attention must be paid. The recommendations appeared this week on his blog, Gates Notes. These Truths, Jill Lepore Gates says this history of the United States by New Yorker writer Jill Lepore is “the most honest account of the American story I’ve ever read, and one of the most beautifully written”. He praises the book’s vast scope and Lepore’s attention to “all the ironies and contradictions in American history”, such as the fact that “America was founded on assertions of liberty and sovereignty while practising African slavery and Native American conquest”. But he complains that the final section, about the 2008 financial crisis, “reads like the work of a critic who is caught up in the passions of the moment”. Growth, by Vaclav Smil This book by Czech-Canadian scientist and professor Vaclav Smil, is not for everyone, Gates admits, but if you can stomach some heavy technical detail, you’ll learn a lot about how civilisations grow – and reach their limits. This 664-page tome covers everything from agriculture to steel production to smartphone use, and Gates thinks it presents a crucial argument for the necessity of acting quickly to preserve Earth’s fragile biosphere. “Nobody sees the big picture with as wide an aperture as Vaclav Smil,” he writes. But he’s more optimistic about our future than the professor is. “In my view,” Gates says, “Smil underestimates our accelerating ability to model the physical world using digital technologies equipped with artificial intelligence.” Not too surprising from the co-founder of Microsoft. Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life, by Diane Tavenner The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has poured millions of US dollars into Summit Public Schools, a charter management organisation that operates 11 schools in California and Washington state. Charter schools are ones that receive government funding but operate independently of the school system in which it is located. With this year’s book list, Gates ratchets up his enthusiasm for Summit co-founder and CEO Diane Tavenner. She’s published a book called Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life, and Gates says parents who read it “will wonder how their kids can have the same extraordinary learning experiences as Summit students”. Maybe. Gates’ giddiness about Summit’s “computer-enabled learning” leaves out some awkward questions, and his impression of typical government-funded school teaching sounds as up-to-date as Windows 2.1. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, by Matthew Walker After so many books and countless articles, the hysteria over sleep deprivation feels awfully tired. But Gates says he was roused to enlightenment by Matthew Walker, who is so impressed by having a PhD that he proclaims it right on the cover of Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. The advice here is now well-known(for example, turn down the thermostat, limit alcohol, avoid blue light), and Gates admits that it took him a while to finish. “I kept following Walker’s advice to put down the book I was reading a bit earlier than I was used to, so I could get a better night’s sleep,” which, if nothing, makes for a classic book blurb. An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones “This year,” Gates says, “I picked up a bit more fiction than usual,” but only one novel makes his list – and it’s from 2018: An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones. (He’s just catching up to US president Barack Obama and US talk show Oprah Winfrey, who both recommended An American Marriage” last year.) The story is about a young married couple separated for years after the husband is falsely accused and convicted of sexual assault. Gates calls it “a deeply moving read” that reminds us “how draconian our criminal justice system can be – especially for black men”. More surprising than anything on this list of five recommended titles is the revelation that Gates has developed a taste for postmodern fiction. “I’m currently trying to finish Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell,” he writes. “It’s amazingly clever but a bit hard to follow … I even picked up a short story collection in David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Maybe next year’s end-of-year books post will finally include the Wallace novel I’ve been wanting to read for a while: Infinite Jest.”