# Mark Zuckerberg book club

Mark Zuckerberg book club (aka A Year of Books) was an online book club hosted by Mark Zuckerberg through his personal Facebook account started in January 2015. Zuckerberg made a book recommendation every two weeks for a year to his millions of Facebook followers.
Zuckerberg came up with the idea as part of his New Year's Resolution for 2015 after Cynthia Greco, the Audience Development Manager for MediaOnePA/York Newspaper Company, suggested that Zuckerberg read a new book every month. Zuckerberg modified the idea to one book every two weeks and books which "emphasize learning about new cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies."

## Book club selections

| # | Date | Author | Title |
| 1 | January 2, 2015 | Moisés Naím | The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be |
| 2 | January 18, 2015 | Steven Pinker | The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined |
| 3 | February 2, 2015 | Sudhir Venkatesh | Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets |
| 4 | February 18, 2015 | Eula Biss | On Immunity: An Inoculation |
| 5 | March 3, 2015 | Ed Catmull | Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration |
| 6 | March 17, 2015 | Thomas Kuhn | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions |
| 7 | March 31, 2015 | Michael Chwe | Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge |
| 8 | April 15, 2015 | Hank Paulson | Dealing With China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower |
| 9 | April 28, 2015 | Peter W. Huber | Orwell's Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest |
| 10 | May 14, 2015 | Michelle Alexander | The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness |
| 11 | June 1, 2015 | Ibn Khaldun | Muqaddimah |
| 12 | June 15, 2015 | Yuval Harari | Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind |
| 13 | June 29, 2015 | Iain Banks | The Player of Games |
| 14 | July 14, 2015 | Vaclav Smil | Energy: A Beginner's Guide |
| 15 | July 28, 2015 | Matt Ridley | Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters |
| 16 | August 12, 2015 | William James | The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature |
| 17 | September 1, 2015 | Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford | Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day |
| 18 | September 16, 2015 | Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson | Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty |
| 19 | September 29, 2015 | Matt Ridley | The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves |
| 20 | October 21, 2015 | Liu Cixin | The Three-Body Problem |
| 21 | November 9, 2015 | Jon Gertner | The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation |
| 22 | December 10, 2015 | Henry Kissinger | World Order |
| 23 | December 28, 2015 | David Deutsch | The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World |

## Reception

The Atlantic wrote that it "has the potential to be Oprahesque in its influence on book sales", in reference to the Oprah Book Club after the first selection by Moisés Naím caused Amazon's stock to sell out. An article in The New Yorker made a similar comparison to Oprah. The Associated Press noted that the second selection by Steven Pinker did not result in any increase in sales according to Nielsen BookScan data.