You’re right, I don’t value the perspectives of people based on color or gender. That includes white and male. I read a book description, maybe a review or two. If it sounds good, I read it. If I liked it I might see if that author has published anything else. Adding layers of vetting just sounds exhausting, and I’d read whatever it was regardless of what I found out anyway.
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So nobody have something to say about the books ?
Despite the fact Thomas Piketty is a white male I may read his book, I ear him sometime on the radio, he have an interesting way to talk about economy.
But I have to say I’m surprise to see so much economy/business books in this selection, and it may explain the high ratio of white males ?
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Honestly, there isn’t a single one on the list that interests me enough to get on my reading list. Maybe the Piketty, but business/economics books aren’t really my thing. The one non-fiction one could perhaps do with a bit more description.
Though I’d like to know Bill Gates’ thoughts on Glenn Greenwald’s No Place To Hide or Matt Taibbi’s The Divide.
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“I don’t care about the race of writers I read,” is simply not racist. There are many people of color who share this belief.
“People who don’t deal with racism the way I think they should are racists,” is not only immature, baseless, and judgmental, it’s amazingly arrogant. These are all the qualities one finds in abundance at sites like Free Republic and Red State. Don’t go down that road.
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It only took me a few pages to realise she was a terrible writer 
Now see THAT’s the quality of trolling I’ve come to expect and appreciate in 2014 
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I’m not sure what the OP meant by “a few years ago,” however there was definitely a trend of “color-blindness” in the early 90s.
Oh boy, here we go. “Anything I don’t like is racist/sexist/bigoted/etc.”
I too remember that.
Makes sense too. I can’t imagine hearing about a book or story and deciding whether to read it based on gender/race/etc.
The closest I’d get to that would be my aversion to certain forms of cover art that bring unbidden associations to bad “chick-lit” that I’ve read. I have to recognize & counter that aversion because I’ve also read a bunch of good “chick-lit”. Quotes are there b/c that term always rubbed me wrong & I’ve never been advised of what is appropriate or if it is. Seems condescending.
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The irony in this line had me cracking up:
"Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty. Capital sparked a fantastic global discussion this year about inequality. Piketty kindly spent an hour discussing his work with me before I finished my review. "
Yup, inequality is pretty interesting.
My main selection criterion is ‘Big, Fuck-Off Spaceships On The Cover’. Am I evil?
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That’s generally a good bet … just be careful so you don’t end up in the swamps of licensed spinoffs.
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You’re entirely right, of course - and at the same time, it would be stranger if they didn’t talk to each other at some point. Which probably just strengthens your point. 
BG, for all of the dubious things he did while at Microsoft, seems like a nerd at heart. I’ve seen him talk about his interests before and can see why he’d find them interesting; I’m probably more receptive to his book recommendations than those of many other important people.
Of course, I also share the “boring white guy with an IT background” thing with him. (Even though my income and career has taken a somewhat different path.)
I’m much more concerned with reading a diverse spectrum of opinons and world views (political, religious, philosophical) than I am with the author’s plumbing or melanin level.
I’ve always tried to bear in mind Lady Jessica’s good advice - “I can think of nothing more poisonous than to rot in the stink of your own reflections.”
Bill, having made one of the biggest piles ever, is quite content with raising the income taxes of the tens of thousands who aspire to someday have 1/10000th of his wealth.
Those who are not happy unless they have a racist bone to gnaw will have no problem finding signs of racism every where they look.
Remind me not to tell you about my preferences in breakfast cereal.
I’d be delighted to suggest some books by Virginia Postrel, Thomas Sowell, and Camille Paglia for Bill’s next years list …
It’s interesting to see people calling out Gates’ privilege in knowing the authors of some of the books when the very posting of his list here on boingboing is in of itself the result of privilege. Take anyone in this post and ask why they don’t have a story up front and center about what they read this year. Of course there’s nothing stopping us from posting out own lists here. Well, the mods could stop us but I’m willing to bet they’ll be ok with people sharing their own lists. It should be much more enlightening than debating the merits of the demographics of the authors on Gates’ list.
Here are my five:
Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday - Written by the architect of American Apparel’s media campaigns that exploit our love for outrage, it examines how easy it is for those with few resources to leverage the outrage machine of the web into tons of free publicity. If nothing else, it will help you identify manufactured outrage when it happens and when someone is attempting to exploit your sense of outrage to manipulate you into spreading their message for them.
Wild by Cheryl Strayed - I love hiking and have long wanted to do an extended trek. Alas, I’m still mostly a day hiker so I enjoyed being able to live vicariously through Strayed on her trek of the Pacific Crest Trail. And as someone with a somewhat similar unstable hippy type childhood, it was easy to identify with her life and how she came to take on the PCT.
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein - This book had sat on my shelf mocking me for not reading it since I bought it a few years ago. I finally sat down one weekend and plowed through it. Glad I did. Though I had already heard bits and pieces of what she presents, she brought it together as a cohesive whole to show the forces at work to expand their power and influence during times of disaster when we are at our weakest.
The Martian by Andy Weir - I don’t read a lot of fiction and while a fan of space exploration, I’m not a fan of manned spaceflight. So I probably wasn’t the target demographic for this novel but thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve seen some criticisms of it being too technical and others of it for not being technical enough, which to me sounds like it hit the sweet spot but I’m an engineer and might not notice if it was a bit too technical. The novel follows the life of an astronaut who accidentally gets stranded on Mars and the efforts to rescue him. Many of my pro-manned spaceflight friends loved the book and felt inspired by it that we should be working hard on a mission to Mars. To me, it strengthened my view that shooting fragile meat bags filled mostly with water around space is inferior to sending robots and probes. That’s pretty good writing to end up with a novel that pleases such divergent viewpoints.
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter. So much of the media coverage in the US seems to tell only one side of the story in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Regardless of which side, if either, one falls, Carter gives valuable first person insight into the leaders who have gotten us to the point we are now. If you’ve ever wanted to be a fly on the wall, here’s your chance.
Also I read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century but since Gates and many others have already mentioned it, I’ll only give it an honorable mention.
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