Bill Gates has just released his list of recommended books for the summer, which, as he says, “run the gamut from seriously educational to seriously escapist.”  On the serious side: John M. Barry’s’s acclaimed history of the 1918 influenza pandemic, The Great Influenza. One of the more lighthearted suggestions: Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened, by Allie Brosh, of which Gates says: “I must have read Melinda a dozen hilarious passages out loud.”

 Read Gates’s full list here: