rcmnd

The CorrespondentBook

by Virginia Evans

Who uses, recommends or left The Correspondent, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Bill Gates
Co-founder of Microsoft and the Gates Foundation; publishes book reviews and essays at Gates Notes.
recommended

Well, one I literally binged this weekend was The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. That's, you know, fiction, very touching, uh uh very upbeat. Apropos of what we just discussed, uh there's a one called Into the Woodchipper by Nicholas Eneric, which talks about how somebody didn't go to a party one weekend and they decided instead to put USAID into the woodchipper.

Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “Bill Gates’s Blunt Warning on A.I.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-gates.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.

2026-09-29·youtube.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.