Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently suggested five books he thinks you should read this summer.

Gates, on his Gate Notes blog, explained that his list “has a good dose of books with science and math at their core…[but] there’s no science or math to my selection process.”

Gates went on to say that the five books “…are simply ones that I loved, made me think in new ways, and kept me up reading long past when I should have gone to sleep.”

Here are Gates’ 5 picks:

• "Seveneves," by Neal Stephenson. This book “inspired me to rekindle my sci-fi habit,” Gates said. “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.”
• "How Not to Be Wrong," by Jordan Ellenberg. “Ellenberg, a mathematician and writer, explains how math plays into our daily lives without our even knowing it.”
• "The Vital Question," by Nick Lane. Gates says the author “is trying to right a scientific wrong by getting people to fully appreciate the role that energy plays in all living things. He argues that we can only understand how life began, and how living things got so complex, by understanding how energy works.”
• "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? "Those questions are at the heart of this series of dialogues between Ryoichi, an economist who died in 2013, and his son Hiroshi, founder of the Internet company Rakuten. The book "is a smart look at the future of a fascinating country," Gates says.
• "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind," by Noah Yuval Harari. "Harari takes on a daunting challenge: to tell the entire history of the human race in just 400 pages," Gates says.

With $75 billion, Gates recently topped Forbes' list of billionaires for the third year in a row.

His net worth is down from $79.2 billion, but still at the peak of the magazine's 30th annual ranking. Gates has made the list for 17 of the last 22 years.

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