What Bill Gates Is Reading This Summer (vs. the Rest of Us) A look at the books on the tech mogul's summer reading list, compared to this year's most popular reads on Amazon.

By Jenna Goudreau

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Bill Gates

Bill Gates recently shared his summer reading list on his website, The Gates Notes. Unsurprisingly, the books he's chosen this year, with topics ranging from economic theory to social issues around the globe, are appropriately smart and serious works. But when compared to what the rest of us are reading this summer, based on the most popular ebooks of 2013 on Amazon.com, it becomes clearer why this is his world, and we just live in it.

What Bill Gates is reading:

1. The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
By Jared Diamond
Viking Adult, 2012

2. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
By Marc Levinson
Princeton University Press, 2008

3. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character
By Paul Tough
Mariner Books, 2013

4. Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing
By Vaclav Smil
MIT Press, 2013

5. Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do (Issues of Our Time)
By Claude Steele
Norton & Company, 2011

What the rest of us are reading:

1. Inferno: A Novel
By Dan Brown
Doubleday, 2013

2. Safe Haven
By Nicholas Sparks
Grand Central Publishing, 2010

3. Gone Girl: A Novel
By Gillian Flynn
Crown, 2012

4. The Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Scribner, 1925

5. Hopeless
By Colleen Hoover
Self-published, 2012

Readers: What's on your summer reading list? Please tell us in the comments section below.

Jenna Goudreau is a senior editor at Business Insider and oversees the Strategy, Careers, and Your Money sections.

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