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Mark Zuckerberg's most revealing act as a reader was a New Year's resolution. In 2015 the Facebook co-founder launched A Year of Books, committing to read a new book every two weeks and to discuss each one in public, with an emphasis on “learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies.” The result is one of the most transparent reading records any technology leader has left: twenty-plus titles, each chosen deliberately and introduced in his own words, ranging across political power, economics, science, criminal justice, world affairs and the occasional science-fiction novel.
The list reads like the syllabus of someone trying to understand the systems he was building at planetary scale. He picks up Michael Chwe's Rational Ritual explicitly because “common knowledge” is central to designing social media; he reads Moisés Naím on how power is dispersing to individuals, and Steven Pinker and Matt Ridley on whether the world is really improving. Underneath the 2015 project is an older, quieter reader: a former classics student who studied Latin and can still quote the Aeneid, and an engineer drawn to books about how discovery and companies actually work. Zuckerberg reads non-fiction to model reality and make decisions — and, unusually, he did much of that reading out loud, in front of an audience of millions.
What Mark Zuckerberg's reading reveals is a founder using books as intellectual infrastructure. A Year of Books was not a vanity list; it was a curriculum, and its recurring subject is power and knowledge — how they are distributed, how they shift, and how a network changes both. His very first pick, Moisés Naím's The End of Power, argues that power is leaking away from large institutions toward individuals — a thesis that describes the platform Zuckerberg himself built. From there the list circles the same question from different altitudes: Henry Kissinger's World Order on power between states, Michael Chwe's Rational Ritual on the “common knowledge” that coordinates crowds, and Ibn Khaldun's The Muqaddimah on the long rise and fall of civilisations.
A second thread is evidence-based optimism, the same worldview that runs through Bill Gates's shelf — and the overlap is not a coincidence. Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, Ridley's The Rational Optimist and Genome, Vaclav Smil on energy, Eula Biss's On Immunity: these make the empirical case that, measured honestly, life is getting better, and that science and exchange are why. Against that he sets a conscience thread — Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, Gang Leader for a Day, Portfolios of the Poor — books about the people the optimistic aggregates leave out.
The surprise is how much of the list is about the limits of any single worldview. He reads Thomas Kuhn on how science lurches forward in paradigm shifts rather than smooth progress, and David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity on explanation as the engine of unlimited possibility, then breaks his own rule with science fiction — Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem, Iain Banks's The Player of Games — as a way of imagining where a technological civilisation might be heading. Read together, Zuckerberg's books are less a list of favourites than the working notes of someone trying to reason clearly about scale, coordination and progress — the exact problems his company forced on the world.
From how power disperses to individuals, Zuckerberg turns to how it is organised between nations — Kissinger's long view of order.
Zooming out to the longest arc, Pinker argues that violence has declined as institutions and knowledge have matured.
Ridley supplies the mechanism behind that progress — exchange and specialisation compounding human ingenuity.
And Deutsch names the deepest engine of all: good explanations, which unlock possibilities without limit.
The chosen fictional coda — imagining, in science fiction, where an advanced technological civilisation might actually be heading.
The book that launched A Year of Books — its thesis, that power is leaking from institutions to individuals, describes the platform Zuckerberg built.
“It's a book that explores how the world is shifting to give individual people more power that was traditionally only held by large governments, militaries and other organizations.”WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books, first pick (Jan 2015)
Pinker’s data-driven case that violence is declining — the empirical backbone of Zuckerberg’s optimism, and an overlap with Bill Gates’s shelf.
“Recent events might make it seem like violence and terrorism are more common than ever, so it's worth understanding that all violence — even terrorism — is actually decreasing over time.”WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Jan 2015)
A sociologist embedded with a Chicago gang — Zuckerberg’s pick about understanding lives very different from his own.
WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Feb 2015)
Biss on vaccines and fear — a pointed pick that, like Gates, plants Zuckerberg firmly on the side of the evidence.
“The science is completely clear: vaccinations work and are important for the health of everyone in our community.”WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Feb 2015)
Catmull on running Pixar — Zuckerberg's clearest reading interest in how great companies protect creativity at scale.
“I love reading first-hand accounts about how people build great companies like Pixar and nurture innovation and creativity.”WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Mar 2015)
Kuhn on paradigm shifts — chosen to ask whether progress is steady or arrives in disruptive bursts, a question close to any technologist.
WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Mar 2015)
On “common knowledge” — the pick Zuckerberg tied most directly to his own work, calling it an important idea for designing social media.
WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Mar/Apr 2015)
Paulson on China's economic rise — reading Zuckerberg pursued alongside his personal study of Chinese language and history.
WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Apr 2015)
Huber's answer to 1984 — a networked counter-argument that communication technology empowers people rather than only the state.
BlogSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Apr 2015)
A 14th-century theory of how civilisations rise and fall — Zuckerberg's most historically ambitious pick.
WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Jun 2015)
Banks's Culture novel — Zuckerberg's window onto a post-scarcity, AI-run civilisation, and one of his rare fiction picks.
“This is a change of pace from all the recent social science books. Instead, it's a science fiction book about an advanced civilization with AI and a vibrant culture.”WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Jun 2015)
Smil on energy from first principles — the same author Bill Gates recommends most, and a shared anchor of their science reading.
WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Jul 2015)
Ridley's chapter-per-chromosome tour of human DNA — popular science Zuckerberg used to go deeper on the biology behind everything else.
BlogSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Jul 2015)
James's classic on religious experience — chosen as a deliberate follow-up to Harari's Sapiens, showing how one book led Zuckerberg to the next.
“When I read 'Sapiens,' I found the chapter on the evolution of the role of religion in human life most interesting and something I wanted to go deeper on.”WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Aug 2015)
Alexander on mass incarceration — the conscience of the list, and the book that pushed Zuckerberg toward criminal-justice reform.
WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (May 2015)
How the world’s poorest actually manage money — reading that fed directly into Zuckerberg’s interest in connectivity and financial inclusion.
“It's mind-blowing that almost half the world — almost 3 billion people — live on $2.50 a day or less.”WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Sep 2015)
Ridley's case that exchange drives progress — Zuckerberg picked it as a deliberate counterpoint to the pessimism of Why Nations Fail.
WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Sep 2015)
China's landmark hard-SF novel — Zuckerberg's most-loved fiction pick and his imaginative counterweight to the year's non-fiction.
“A fun break from all the economics and social science books I’ve read recently.”WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Oct 2015)
The history of Bell Labs — Zuckerberg reading about the environments and people that produce sustained innovation.
WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Nov 2015)
Kissinger on how international order is built and maintained — the geopolitical bookend to the list's opening question of power.
WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books (Dec 2015)
Deutsch on explanation as the engine of unlimited progress — the book Zuckerberg deliberately chose to close A Year of Books.
“It's fitting to end the year with 'The Beginning of Infinity' by David Deutsch, about how the way we explain things unlocks greater possibilities.”WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — A Year of Books, final pick (Dec 2015)
A genuine favourite from his classical schooling — Zuckerberg studied Latin and has quoted the Aeneid, including its ideal of an enterprise that “knows no boundaries in time and greatness.”
WebsiteSource: The New Yorker — “The Face of Facebook” profile (2010)
A post-2015 personal recommendation — historical fiction about the electrification patent wars, a founder-versus-founder story in another era.
“A novel about the competition to electrify the nation between Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla.”WebsiteSource: Mark Zuckerberg — summer reading recommendation
Intel's Andy Grove on managing — the management book Zuckerberg credits with shaping how he runs a company, endorsed after Grove's death.
“Andy's book played a big role in shaping my management style.”BookSource: Mark Zuckerberg — endorsement of Andy Grove
A public book club Zuckerberg ran in 2015 as a personal challenge: read a new book every two weeks, with an emphasis on different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies. He selected 23 books over the year and introduced each in his own words — the core of his documented reading.
Chiefly his A Year of Books picks — among them The End of Power, The Better Angels of Our Nature, World Order, The Muqaddimah, Energy, Genome, The New Jim Crow, The Three-Body Problem and The Beginning of Infinity. Outside 2015 he has endorsed Andy Grove’s High Output Management and recommended The Last Days of Night.
He tends to avoid naming a single favourite. The clearest documented personal favourite is Virgil’s Aeneid, which he studied in Latin and still quotes. Note that Ender’s Game is often listed as his favourite — but Zuckerberg has explicitly said it is not, that he simply liked it and added it to an old profile.
A Year of Books was a 2015 project and he did not continue it at the same pace. Since then his recommendations have been occasional — for example High Output Management (2016) and a summer pick, The Last Days of Night.
Overwhelmingly non-fiction about power, science, history, economics and inequality — how large systems work and change — with a few science-fiction novels (The Three-Body Problem, The Player of Games) as deliberate breaks. His reading closely overlaps with Bill Gates’s.