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.
