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Here are the 5 Books on Bill Gates’ Holiday Reading List
The billionaire philanthropist is giving hundreds of copies to little libraries around the world / BY Kim Honey / November 23rd, 2022
Bill Gates, who reads about 50 books a year, is “casting a wider net” by choosing a few old favourites for his annual holiday reading list rather than the top five books he’s read in the last year. On his Gates Notes blog, he includes Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, which he and his high-school buddy, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, fell in love with when they were “just kids.” One of Gates’ favourite sci-fi novels of all time, the novel – first published in 1961 – features a human raised on Mars who returns to Earth and struggles to fit into society. “I think the best science fiction pushes your thinking about what’s possible in the future, and Heinlein managed to predict the rise of hippie culture years before it emerged,” Gates writes.
Here’s the rest of the list: “the best memoir by a rock star I actually know” is Surrender, the new autobiography by Bono; the best guide to leading a country is Team of Rivals, a book about Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin; the best book about the periodic table is Mendelyev’s Dream by Paul Strathern; and the best “guide to getting out of your own way” is The Inner Game of Tennis by Robert Gallwey.
Gates, the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, says he purchased copies of all five books for more than a 100 Little Free Libraries around the world. As the map of the library locations shows, the only one in Canada is in Vancouver, B.C., although it does not specify which one. Let the search begin!