Billionaire Bill Gates has said he reads about a book a week. Our friends at Business Insider sifted through years of Gates' book recommendations to find 12 that made especially strong impressions on him and then collated them into this handy infographic. We've also included links so you can snap them up yourself.

It's time to put the little one to bed. What do you do? Put on an audiobook, read them a bedtime story with fun pictures, or turn on some cartoons? A new study suggests the old standby of an illustrated bedtime story is best for developing your children's brain.

Speed reading is a skill that can be hard to master. There are a ton of books, talks, and articles dedicated to teaching people the "right" way to learn the skill. This week, Fast Company spoke to one of those experts who wrote a book on topic to get some quick and dirty tips on how to learn. One of her suggestions: use an index card.

Sidekicks. Always there to lend a helping hand, or sword, or wand, as the case may be. A hero is nothing without his or her sidekick, but these companions rarely get the recognition they deserve. A few second bananas may get the spotlight on occasion -- your Robins, your Chewbaccas, your Igors -- but they all originated in comics, films, or on TV. This list is for the truly forgotten, the most overlooked of the overlooked. Here is a ranking of the top 10 best science fiction and fantasy sidekicks that originated in books.

Recommendmeabook.com shows you the first page of a random popular book, stripped of identifying info. If you like it, reveal the cover; if you don't, click "next book".

"The important thing to know about spelling is that it's not just rote memorization," says Ananya Vinay, champion of the 2017 Scripps US National Spelling Bee, who will ceremonially open this year's bee next week. While Vinay uses flashcards to study specific words, she says the real trick is learning where different words come from.

Speculative fiction is the literature of change and discovery. But every now and then, a book comes along that changes the rules of science fiction for everybody. Certain great books inspire scores of authors to create something new. Here are 21 of the most influential science fiction and fantasy books.

Not all of us are natural bookworms, but when it comes to learning new skills, being able to read faster gives you a huge advantage.

Therein lies the value of the Award-Winning Speed Reading Bundle. Featuring two award-winning resources, this collection is designed to triple your reading speed and improve your comprehension, and it's on sale for over 90 per cent off.

Video: When you read to kids, you do so much more than "reading" - you put on a performance and hold a conversation. You do voices, you show them the pictures, and you follow the special cadence of kids' books.

iOS: I love to read, I do. When I was a kid, I was that kid who would go to the library and — no joke — check out a huge stack of books in one sitting (mainly Choose Your Own Adventure titles, which I loved). I wish I had more time to read nowadays, but I'm confident that applying a little geekery to my literary pursuits might help.

Why aren't the youths connecting with Shakespeare these days? Young adult novelist Jason Reynolds shared some thoughts on The Daily Show With Trevor Noah recently, plainly stating, "Young people are allergic to boredom." He doesn't mean Shakespeare is boring - the guy's been dead for more than 400 years and yet his plays are still everywhere - but the way it's being taught can be pretty drab.

"Hurray!" tweets Yale sociologist Nicholas A. Christakis. "Science vindicates my longstanding practice, learned at age 12, of using TWO SPACES after periods in text. NOT ONE SPACE."

Everyone has their own small tricks for reading more books (or at least, pretending you read books), and more generally, working our way through a never-ending backlog of podcast episodes, old New Yorker issues, Spotify playlists, and other assorted content.

The Kindle app lets you read your ebooks purchased on Amazon, of course, but it has other useful functions you might not know about. Things like creating flashcards to help you study, importing free classic books to read, and saving articles to read offline later.

Over the weekend, the premiere award in science fiction and fantasy writing - the Hugo Awards - announced their six finalists for Best Novel. There are some familiar names up for this year's award, which is set to be announced later in the year, and a fresh new face, too.

If you want to dive in to some of the best science fiction and fantasy writing from the last year - these are the six books the Hugos suggest you read!

I didn't want to stop. I'd been reading to my daughter her entire life, even before she was a person I could hold in my arms. I read Goodnight Moon when she was in utero, Knuffle Bunny when she was a toddler, Ramona and Beezus when she was in early primary school.

When we're not writing about saving money or why you shouldn't quit Facebook, Lifehacker staffers can usually be found reading through their Pocket lists, scouring Reddit, or catching up on the latest best sellers. Lucky us, reading is a big part of the job.

The world's great thinkers and scientists have long written down what they learn - we can head all the way back to Newton to see that. Some write for other academics and some write for the public. When the two meet, you find some of the most influential books about science that have ever been written. I'm a big non-fiction fan and, having been a scientist, have compiled a reading list for anyone interested in getting their science on.

Here it is!

I watched Westworld months after it aired, and I felt lonely; no one still wanted to talk about it. Half the fun of a good work of entertainment - a TV show, a movie, a book, even a podcast or video game - is talking about it, studying it, learning more about it. Any good work of art benefits from study, and a bad work of art benefits from laughing at it with someone.