books

Source Code: My Beginnings, Bill Gates (Knopf, 2025)
Covers the mogul's life up until Microsoft packed up in Albuquerque and moved to Seattle. It's a remarkably self-reflective memoir for someone on the autism spectrum. Gates attributes the secret of his success as his ability to concentrate ceaselessly on any task that interests him, an inclination not shared, to his irritation, by his business partners, except for one friend who died in a mountain-climbing accident while they were still in high school. Gates' intellectual passion was for anything that could be defined exactly, without gray areas or ambiguity. At school he thought of himself as a mathematician, and he was the best one at his school. But when he got to Harvard, he found - as have many others who've gone there - that everybody at Harvard had been the best at their school, and others now outshone him. His turning point came when a friend suggested that he concentrate on what he was the best at, computer programming. This had been a neglected field because software was then thought of as the free supplement to hardware. Gates credits himself with changing that attitude. But when he started a real company, he found himself concerned with covering the practical necessities of running a business, which - again - his business partners had no interest in. He had a real love/hate relationship with Paul Allen in particular: they were friends, appreciated each other's talents, but got on each other's nerves and argued fiercely.

The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians, 1962-1993, Anthony Burgess (Carcanet, 2024)
I picked this up at the concert with Burgess's music I attended a few weeks ago. It's a UK publication not in print in the US. It's a large (75 items) collection of Burgess's music journalism - reviews and feature articles. It does not include his monograph This Man and Music, though there is some overlap in content. It's mostly classical, of course, and when he dips into popular music you wish he hadn't. The title article is on whether music can be dangerous, and he dismisses pop music as too puerile (his word) to be of any concern: that's why the Devil prefers Mozart. Burgess claims to be writing for a general audience, but often delves rather bewilderingly into technical talk: I've had a modest technical training in harmonic theory, but I couldn't always follow him. Because these are separate pieces, there's a lot of repetition, including of Burgess's weird theory that Lady Macbeth's "Screw your courage to the sticking place" refers to tuning a lute. The editor, Paul Phillips, provides footnotes correcting numerous factual errors.