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Here are the 5 books Bill Gates wants you to read this summer

Billionaire's beach reading suggestions include mathematician's "How Not to Be Wrong" and an 800-page Neal Stephenson novel.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
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Gael Cooper
2 min read

You may not be able to vacation like a billionaire this summer, but you can read like one.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates released his annual recommended reading list for summer on Tuesday. Let's just say he's not losing himself in Sweet Valley High paperbacks and "Gone Girl" knockoffs.

Gates' list consists of lots of science and math-packed tomes, and only one novel -- an 880-pager from fellow Seattleite Neal Stephenson. Gates offers the recommendations in a blog post on GatesNotes.com, and in a video in which a cartoon Bill drinks a froofy drink on the beach in one scene and floats through space in another.

Here are the five Gates-recommended books, with comments from his reviews:

"Seveneves," by Neal Stephenson

"The plot gets going in the first sentence, when the moon blows up...Seveneves inspired me to rekindle my sci-fi habit."

"How Not to be Wrong," by Jordan Ellenberg

"Ellenberg writes, 'to do mathematics is to be, at once, touched by fire and bound by reason' -- and that there are ways in which we're all doing math, all the time."

"The Vital Question," by Nick Lane

"More people should know about this guy's work. He is trying to right a scientific wrong by getting people to fully appreciate the role that energy plays in all living things. "

"The Power to Compete," by Ryoichi Mikitani and Hiroshi Mikitani

"Why were (Japan's) companies -- the juggernauts of the 1980s -- eclipsed by competitors in South Korea and China? And can they come back?"

"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind," by Yuval Noah Harari

"Harari takes on a daunting challenge: to tell the entire history of the human race in just 400 pages...I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who's interested in the history and future of our species."

(Via GeekWire)