A Year of Books

Mark Zuckerberg had a busy year last year. On top of all his usual responsibilities, the Facebook founder and CEO became a father, read 23 books and lunched a Facebook community called “A Year of Books”, where he posted a new book (that he was currently reading) every two weeks. He encouraged others to read along and share their thoughts and comments.

Throughout the year he read and featured these 23 books:

#1 The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be

by Moisés Naím

#2 The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker

#3 Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

by Sudhir Venkatesh

#4 On Immunity: An Inoculation

by Eula Biss

#5 Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

by Ed Catmull

#6 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

by Thomas Kuhn

#7 Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge

by Michael Chwe

#8 Dealing With China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower

by Hank Paulson

#9 Orwell’s Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest

by Peter W. Huber

#10 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

by Michelle Alexander

#11 Muqaddimah

by Ibn Khaldun

#12 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Harari

#13 The Player of Games

by Iain Banks

#14 Energy: A Beginners Guide

by Vaclav Smil

#15 Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

by Matt Ridley

#16 The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature

by William James

#17 Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day

by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford

#18 Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

by Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson

#19 The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

by Matt Ridley

#20 The Three-Body Problem

by Liu Cixin

#21 The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

by Jon Gertner

#22 World Order

by Henry Kissinger

#23 The Beginning of Infinity

by David Deutsch

Zuckerberg came up with the idea as part of his New Years Resolution for 2015, and in the first post he announced that the purpose of the community would be to “emphasize learning about new cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies.”

The Facebook page also featured many live discussions and Q&As with the authors of the aforementioned books, such as Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation; and Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, and many others.

Click here to visit the Facebook page for A Year of Books.