Bill Gates Shares Five ‘Good’ Books To Wrap Up A ‘Lousy’ Year
Video screenshot via Bill Gates
Bill Gates is back with his incredible book suggestions as part of a biannual routine that takes place every summer and winter. His lineup this time around is specially curated to end the year positively, be it to enlighten readers or to keep their minds off anything too stressful.
The Microsoft cofounder described that this year has compelled him and other readers to “turn to all kinds of different books” for different ways to cope with the troubling year. “I chose to go deeper on a difficult subject, like the injustices that underlie this year’s Black Lives Matter protests. Other times I needed a change of pace, something lighter at the end of the day,” he noted in a blog post.
Having completed a number of “excellent” reads that fulfill these objectives, Gates has chosen his top five “good books” he hopes will offer some balance to a “lousy year.”
These comprise Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which he explained to have broadened his grasp of systemic racism as a white person; David Epstein’s Range for career advice, which explains why diverse experiences are so important nowadays; Erik Larson’s suddenly relevant The Splendid and the Vile, which details the lives of the English in 1940 and 1941 when they kept indoors “as Germany tried to bomb them into submission;” Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor, a nonfiction espionage story set in the Cold War; and the “truly uplifting” Breath from Salt by Bijal P. Trivedi, who described how a breakthrough in science had led to the transformation of the lives of cystic fibrosis patients and their loved ones.
Learn more about his top reads for the end of 2020 below.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson
The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben Macintyre
Breath from Salt: A Deadly Genetic Disease, a New Era in Science, and the Patients and Families Who Changed Medicine by Bijal P. Trivedi
[via Boing Boing and Gates Notes, video and cover image via Bill Gates]
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