Gates names favorite books of 2016
The season is awash in best books lists, and here’s one more — Bill Gates’ favorite books of 2016. Gates is an avid reader, and he doesn’t flinch from a challenging book. Here’s his list:
“String Theory” by David Foster Wallace. I wouldn’t have paired Gates with cult writer and tragic genius Wallace (Wallace, who suffered from depression, committed suicide in 2008). But Gates enjoyed this collection of five of Wallace’s best essays on tennis, a sport Gates said he gave up in his Microsoft days but “am once again pursuing with passion. . . . Here, as in his other brilliant works, Wallace found mind-blowing ways of bending language like a metal spoon.”
“Shoe Dog” by Phil Knight. Gates liked this memoir of the co-founder of Nike because of its honesty about the true path of business success: “messy, precarious, and riddled with mistakes.”
“The Gene” by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Gates called out Mukherjee, the author of the groundbreaking “The Emperor of All Maladies,” for his status as a “quadruple threat:” oncologist, teacher, researcher and author. Mukherjee “guides us through the past, present and future of genome science, with special emphasis on huge ethical questions that the latest and greatest genome technologies provoke,” Gates said.
“The Myth of the Strong Leader” by Archie Brown. After the November election, Gates picked up this book by an Oxford University scholar of political leadership, which makes the case that leaders who make the greatest contributions to history “are generally not the ones we perceive to be ‘strong leaders.’ Instead, they tend to be the ones who collaborate, delegate and negotiate — and recognize that no one person can or should have the answers.”
Gates gave an honorable mention to “The Grid” by Gretchen Bakke, an investigation into our aging electrical grid and why modernizing it is so important.