At the end of the year, Bill Gates usually shares book recommendations on his blog. In 2023, he continued the tradition and told
Great books, courses, and music for the holidays / GatesNotes about 3 books that he wants to recommend to everyone. Also on the list of recommendations was a course of lectures on economics, and to create a festive mood — a playlist of Christmas music with tracks from different countries.
Gates's book recommendations are as follows:
- "The Song of the Cage", Siddhartha Mukherjee. A new book by an American oncologist who won the Pulitzer Prize for the popular science book "The King of All Diseases. Cancer biography". In the new work, he explains how life evolved from single-celled organisms, and how any human disease ultimately boils down to some kind of problems with cells. After reading it, you begin to better understand how diseases and our bodies work.
- "Not the end of the world", Hannah Richie. The eco-activist uses the data to prove that the climate is not as close to Doomsday scenarios as one might think after all the news. Yes, things are bad now and the climate is worse than it was in the distant past, but improvements are being observed in almost all parameters. Gates recommends this book to anyone who wants to have a balanced conversation about the environment.
- "Inventions and innovations: A brief history of hype and failures", Vaclav Smil. It may seem that we are living in the most innovative era of human history, but the Czech-Canadian scientist does not agree with this. In a new book, he argues that you are now seeing "clear signs of technological stagnation and slowing development." And although not everyone will agree with his forecasts for the future (Gates, for example, does not agree), his digression into the past and stories about how inventions of the past helped us reach the current level of development deserve attention.
As for the courses, Gates recommends the Economics, Third Edition lecture series by Professor Timothy Taylor. The online course consists of 36 lectures and covers the basic concepts of economics. Gates believes that this knowledge will be useful to everyone, regardless of whether they have studied economics before or not.
A selection of Christmas music on Spotify completes the list of recommendations. You can listen to the original playlist here, and we have collected in a separate playlist everything that is available on Yandex Music.
And now it's your turn to share recommendations! Write down which books or lectures you liked in 2023.
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