Mark Zuckerberg book club (a.k.a. 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 Citation1January 2, 2015Moisés NaímThe End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be2January 18, 2015Steven PinkerThe Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined3February 2, 2015Sudhir VenkateshGang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets4February 18, 2015Eula BissOn Immunity: An Inoculation5March 3, 2015Ed CatmullCreativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration6March 17, 2015Thomas KuhnThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions7March 31, 2015Michael ChweRational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge8April 15, 2015Hank PaulsonDealing With China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower9April 28, 2015Peter W. HuberOrwell's Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest10May 14, 2015Michelle AlexanderThe New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness11June 1, 2015Ibn KhaldunMuqaddimah12 June 15, 2015Yuval HarariSapiens: A Brief History of Humankind13June 29, 2015Iain BanksThe Player of Games14July 14, 2015Vaclav SmilEnergy: A Beginner's Guide15July 28, 2015Matt RidleyGenome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters16August 12, 2015William JamesThe Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature17September 1, 2015Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart RutherfordPortfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day18September 16, 2015Daron Acemoğlu, James A. RobinsonWhy Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty19September 29, 2015Matt RidleyThe Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves20October 21, 2015Liu CixinThe Three-Body Problem21November 9, 2015Jon GertnerThe Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation22December 10, 2015Henry KissingerWorld Order23December 28, 2015David DeutschThe 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.
References
External links A Year of Books, official Facebook page