Here’s a little secret about highly successful people: They read. Former President Barack Obama is known to be a voracious reader—making time for the habit daily while, you know, just running a country. He’s joined by many others who will tell you reading played a key part in their success including Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Cuban, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Kamala Harris and many more. Agree with them or not, their work has impacted the world and our everyday lives.

Warren Buffet reports that he reads 5 or 6 hours per day while Bill Gates says he gets through a book per week. Oprah read every day as a child in order to see a world beyond the small town where she grew up calling books "her personal path to freedom." Whether you’re a billionaire, entrepreneur, businessperson or just looking to get ahead, reading will help you keep on learning and train your brain to see things from a different point-of-view.

If you’ve ever wanted to know what’s on the ultra elites’ reading list, or want to start building a successful habit of your own, look no further than this mix of fiction and nonfiction books on the Libby app. (Free books from your library? You can’t get much smarter than that.)

Barack Obama recommends:

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Edwin St. Andrew is 18 years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal. Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

Elon Musk recommends:

What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill

Humanity's written history spans only five thousand years. Our yet-unwritten future could last for millions more—or it could end tomorrow. Astonishing numbers of people could lead lives of great happiness or unimaginable suffering, or never live at all, depending on what we choose to do today. Philosopher William MacAskill argues for longtermism, that idea that positively influencing the distant future is a key moral priority of our time. From this perspective, it's not enough to reverse climate change or avert the next pandemic. We must ensure that civilization would rebound if it collapsed; counter the end of moral progress; and prepare for a planet where the smartest beings are digital, not human. If we put humanity's course to right, our grandchildren's grandchildren will thrive, knowing we did everything we could to give them a world full of justice, hope and beauty.

Warren Buffett recommends:

The Moment of Lift by Melinda Gates

For the last 20 years, Melinda Gates has been on a mission to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. Throughout this journey, one thing has become increasingly clear to her: If you want to lift a society up, you need to stop keeping women down. Melinda shares lessons she's learned from the inspiring people she's met during her work and travels around the world. Her unforgettable narrative is backed by startling data as she presents the issues that most need our attention—from child marriage to lack of access to contraceptives to gender inequity in the workplace. Throughout, she shows how there has never been more opportunity to change the world—and ourselves.

Oprah Winfrey recommends:

That Bird Has My Wings by Jarvis Jay Masters

That Bird Has My Wings is the astounding memoir of death row inmate Jarvis Masters and a testament to the tenacity of the human spirit and the talent of a fine writer. Offering scenes from his life that are at times poignant, revelatory, frightening, soul-stirring, painful, funny and uplifting, this book tells the story of the author's childhood with parents addicted to heroin, an abusive foster family, a life of crime and imprisonment and the eventual embracing of Buddhism.

Mark Cuban recommends:

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

Mark Zuckerberg recommends:

Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

Creativity, Inc. is a manual for anyone who strives for originality and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation—into the meetings, postmortems and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about creativity—but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.” The joyousness of the storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, in this book, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable.

Jeff Bezos recommends:

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

This is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of a butler named Stevens. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness," and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.

Bill Gates recommends:

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Spanning 30 years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.

Kamala Harris recommends:

Native Son by Richard Wright

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.

*Title availability may vary by region.

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