Beach Reads with Bill Gates
Add Bill Gates to those offering summer beach reads. The philanthropic computer genius offers a list of seasonal reads each year and several are rising on Amazon as a result of his support.
The paperback edition of the bestselling nonfiction title How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg (PRH/Penguin; OverDrive Sample) is just outside the Top 100 while the newly released paperback edition of the bestselling SF novel Seveneves, Neal Stephenson (Harper/William Morrow; Brilliance Audio; OverDrive Sample), is on its heels.
Gates, clearly invested in the importance of understanding math, says of Ellenberg’s book that the author:
“… explains how math plays into our daily lives without our even knowing it. Each chapter starts with a subject that seems fairly straightforward—electoral politics, say, or the Massachusetts lottery—and then uses it as a jumping-off point to talk about the math involved. In some places the math gets quite complicated, but he always wraps things up by making sure you’re still with him. The book’s larger point is that, as 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.”
Returning to a favorite genre, Gates says of Seveneves:
“I hadn’t read any science fiction for a decade when a friend recommended this novel. I’m glad she did. The plot gets going in the first sentence, when the moon blows up. People figure out that in two years a cataclysmic meteor shower will wipe out all life on Earth, so the world unites on a plan to keep humanity going by launching as many spacecraft as possible into orbit. You might lose patience with all the information you’ll get about space flight—Stephenson, who lives in Seattle, has clearly done his research—but I loved the technical details. Seveneves inspired me to rekindle my sci-fi habit.”
Also on the list:
The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life, Nick Lane (Norton; OverDrive Sample).
The Power to Compete: An Economist and an Entrepreneur on Revitalizing Japan in the Global Economy, Hiroshi Mikitani , Ryoichi Mikitani (Wiley; OverDrive Sample).
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari (Harper; OverDrive Sample).
Gates even offers a video promoting each of the titles:
Illustrating Gates’s reach with the news media, his reading list got covered by such diverse outlets as USA Today, Town & Country, Vox, and The Washington Post.
For your use in creating displays, we’ve put together a downloadable spreadsheet of all his selections Gates Summer Reading, 2012 thru 2016.
Below are direct links: