Simsion's romantic comedy, The Rosie Effect, is the only fiction among the five books named today on GatesNotes, the blog of the Microsoft founder turned philanthropist.

In his review, Gates writes that The Rosie Effect is "the hilarious follow-up to The Rosie Project, one of the best novels I've read in ages. There's no sophomore [second-novel] slump here. Simsion brings back some of the best characters and gags from the first novel while also bringing in enough new elements to keep it fresh. It's a funny novel that also made me think about relationships: what makes them work and how we have to keep investing time and energy to make them better. A sweet, entertaining, and thought-provoking book."

The Rosie Effect, which follows the chaotic birth of a child to the socially awkward professor Don Tillman and his new wife, Rosie, is published by Simon & Schuster in the US on December 31, but Gates writes, "the author was nice enough to send Melinda and me advance copies before he stopped by the office in September".

The other books on Gates' list are Business Adventures by John Brooks, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, How Asia Works by Joe Studwell, and Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization by Vaclav Smil.

Melinda Gates first read The Rosie Project, Simsion's debut novel about Tillman's methodical attempts to find a partner, and raved about it to her husband, who included it on his list of six books for summer reading in July.

Calling it a "profound" book, he wrote then: "Anyone who occasionally gets overly logical will identify with the hero, a genetics professor with Asperger's Syndrome who goes looking for a wife. (Melinda thought I would appreciate the parts where he's a little too obsessed with optimising his schedule. She was right.) It's an extraordinarily clever, funny and moving book about being comfortable with who you are and what you're good at."

Since then Gates has given The Rose Project to about 50 people. He asked to meet Simsion, who detoured on his way home from a trip to the US in September and recorded a conversation with Bill and Melinda Gates.

"I'm thoroughly delighted at Bill Gates' interest in the book," Simsion said. "He will draw it to the attention of a group of people that might not otherwise have looked at it – men, professionals and managers who would maybe have been put off by the romance and chick-lit packaging in the US."

Simsion's Australian publisher, Michael Heyward at Text Publishing, said it was hard to quantify the effect of Gates' enthusiasm on international sales of The Rosie Project, which total almost 2 million.

He puts much of the book's success down to Simsion's being a "tireless advocate" and the unusual ability of the comedy to entertain readers around the world from America to Britain and Russia to Korea.

The book has been a New York Times bestseller for six months and Sony Pictures has a film adaptation in development.

The Rosie Effect has so far been published in Australia, Britain and Canada, and Heyward expects sales eventually to exceed a million copies.