These are the books I found there:

* The Blue Death, http://www.amazon.com/The-Blue-Death-Disease-Disaster/dp/B00...

* Principles of Neural Science (a canonical textbook)

* Immunobiology

* Genome

* Linus Pauling's General Chemistry

* Richard Dawkins' Ancestor's Tale

* Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science

* Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos

_Ancestor's Tale_ is a wonderful book. I highly recommend it.

Am I the only one who noticed the Weather for dummies? I wonder why he was interested on it.

His primary interests now are fighting poverty and hunger. Having a basic understanding of weather sounds like something nice to have in that situation, and if he spent the time in high school and college thinking about computers and businesses, a "for dummies" book might not be the worst place to start.

Interestingly, the first "for dummies" book was actually "DOS For Dummies" published in 1991, followed by "Windows For Dummies". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Dummies#History

Brushing up on his cloud computing.

He lives in Seattle so he has plenty of weather to be interested in. :-)

There are only two kinds of weather in Seattle: you get rain for 6 months and sun for 6 months. Its quite simple actually.

Don't forget the week of snow in December and the two weeks in late February!

Seattle gets a week of snow about once every four years, or at least it did when I lived there 10 years ago.

It literally just snowed last night and caught everyone totally off guard (melted now).

We've been getting at least a few days per year since then

Weather control, obviously.

Actually yes.

http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/weather-modification-bill...

The chemtrail nuts? Come on.

Wow. Just the other day I was looking at the clouds and wondering how it all works up there and not some three-hundred word blogpost; seriously, why are there different clouds? The sky is such a big part of my everyday life, yet I know nothing about it. I searched around but couldn't find any good books on clouds.

This seems like a good start though. Mad respect for Bill.

a lot of science books (chemistry, weather, etc), but no MSPress book and no computer literature?

For ending poverty on a global scale, wouldn't weather and chemistry seem like a decent place to start? Consider immunobiology and agriculture.

Also: I know it's a cheap shot, but I had a good laugh when I saw a book called "The Blue Death" on his shelf.

I assume it's only a tiny slice of his library. Inferring from the fact he's the world's richest geek, and that he's spent $30 million on a set of da Vinci papers,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Leicester