Big Tech's New Idea: Read Some Books

A couple of weeks ago, I unexpectedly received a hefty pile of books, dispatched from the office of Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft. An accompanying note explained that Gates had selected the tomes as his favourite summer reads – and was keen to send these around to friends, contacts and journalists as a “thought-provoking mix of memoir, history and fiction”.

- Gillian Tett

“Hooray!” I wanted to cheer. That is partly because I am a published author myself, and thus completely biased in favour of supporting the book industry. Heaven knows it needs help at a time when the price of books keeps tumbling on websites such as Amazon.

I was also rather delighted by Gates’s selections, which could easily keep somebody happily engaged round a holiday pool. There were some predictably feel-good non-fiction books celebrating technological progress and genius, such as Hans Rosling’s Factfulness and Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. But the pile included the whimsical literary gem Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, and a challenging meditation on faith and life by Kate Bowler, a professor diagnosed with stage IV cancer at the age of 35, called Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved.

There was a third reason I was pleased by the book offering: it seems to be one small sign of a bigger counter cultural trend now afoot in the tech world. These days, there is increasing anxiety that modern life is being damaged by a relentless slide into disembodied cyberspace: we are so addicted to our tablets, phones and other digital devices, the lament goes, that our social interactions are becoming shallow and brief, and our minds too distracted to concentrate.