Five books Bill Gates would like you to read next year
The
internet has brought us online courses, video lectures and pod casts to make
learning more interesting, but Bill Gates, the world's richest man by a wide
margin, still prefers to pick up a book to learn about a new topic, he writes
on his blog.
Gates
says he has “read about a book a week“ since he was a child, including the
entire set of his parents' World Book Encyclopaedias. And he has
recommendations for other keen readers based on his own reading this year.
“They cover an eclectic mix of topics--from tennis to tennis shoes, genomics to
great leadership. They're all very well written, and they all dropped me down a
rabbit hole of unexpected insights and pleasures.“
1 String Theory, by David Foster Wallace
“This
book has nothing to do with physics, but its title will make you look super
smart if you're reading it on a train or plane.“ Gates says it is a collection
of five of Wallace's best essays on tennis, “a sport I gave up in my Microsoft
days and am once again pursuing with a passion“.
2 Shoe Dog, the memoir by Phil Knight
who
co-founded Nike, “is a refreshingly honest reminder of what the path to
business success really looks like: messy, precarious, and riddled with
mistakes.“ Gates says Knight is reserved in his social interactions but in the
book he “opens up in a way few CEOs are willing to do.“
3 Then there's The Gene
by Pulitzer winner Siddhartha Mukherjee whose
The Emperor of All Maladies was a bestseller. “Mukherjee guides us through the
past, present and future of genome science, with a special focus on huge
ethical questions that the latest and greatest genome technologies provoke.“
4 The Myth of the Strong Leader
by Archie Brown makes it because it has an
important lesson for our time: “leaders who make the biggest contributions to
history and humanity generally are not the ones we perceive to be `strong
leaders'. Instead, they tend to be the ones who collaborate, delegate, and
negotiate.“
5 The Grid, by Gretchen Bakke
which discuss es America's ageing electrical
grid, rounds off the best-five as one of the “books about mundane stuff that
are actually fascinating.“
For more:
Gatesnotes
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