[For an explanation of this series, see the post The (Book) Lives of the (Not So) Rich and (Marginally) Famous. I will be asking the same questions of all I interview, with a few followup questions as needed.]
❦
This series has sought to encourage wide reading by pulling the curtain back on the reading habits of a few readers of varying ‘celebrity.’ I’ve wanted to interview the genuinely famous and have approached a couple, but, to date, none have found sufficient time or whimsy to respond.
Image from Time Magazine
Until now.
Well, not really.
No doubt Bill Gates would have jumped at the opportunity to be profiled in this space had I asked him. Instead, Time Magazine, with questions oddly similar to my own, published an interview with him in the May 22, 2017 issue. It’s a fun interview to which I cannot resist adding my annotations. The quotes are all Gates’.
Warren Buffett loaned me his copy of Business Adventures by John Brooks many years ago.
A man who could probably buy Amazon borrows, instead of buys, a book. Maybe that’s why he’s rich and I’m not.
Melinda and I both love the book [The Great Gatsby], and it’s the novel that I reread the most.
Reading is best as a communal activity. To share what one reads, to discuss it, to savor it with another, is part of its joy. If one can do that with his partner, so much the better. Good for Bill and Melinda!
And some books are so rich that they bear re-reading. The experience of reading them does something to us. Returning renews and deepens that experience.
I read the whole set of World Book encyclopedias when I was a kid.
What was I doing when I was a kid? Not that.
My elementary school librarian, Mrs. Blanche Caffiere at Seattle’s View Ridge Elementary School, introduced me to biographies of famous figures throughout history.
Each of our lives is littered with people who simply in doing what they love and being who God made them to be touch us in profound ways, ways they never could imagine in the moment. This librarian no doubt knew she had a bright kid. She never could have imagined that he’d be talking about her in Time Magazine 60 years later.
The biggest problem I have is that I refuse to stop reading a book in the middle, even if I don’t like it.
I get that, and it is a problem. Right now I’m 490 pages into George Elliot’s Middlemarch still waiting to meet a character I care about.
I love the way good fiction can take you out of your own thoughts and into someone else’s.
This is the primary reason I urge those who preach or teach to read widely and wildly. Otherwise, we get stuck with singular perspectives.
I was lucky to have parents who encouraged me to read.
So did I. I wish I could thank them for it.
Rebecca Jean
I read most of the World Book Encyclopedia set when I was in 6th grade. It was new, I sat in the back of the room, and everyone told me 6th grade was review for 7th, so I figured I only needed to pay limited attention (and in reality, that was all I had to do to pass with good grades). But I only got to H or I volume, I think.
Randy
Which is another reason to lament the loss of paper encyclopedias. Gone is the joy of browsing!
Kedric W.
One disagreement. Bill Gates may be very wealthy, but there’s no way he could buy Amazon at this point. He probably has the stock, though. 🙂
Randy
See – there is another way, then, that Bill Gates and I are JUST alike. Neither of us is capable of buying Amazon.