Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made an announcement on his social media page that for 2015, he has set a personal challenge for himself of reading a new book every week all year long. He said in this manner, he will be able to learn about various cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies.
Virtual book club on Facebook
The Facebook CEO is offering users an opportunity to join a virtual book club as part of his personal challenge. Zuckerberg has created a page called “A Year of Books” and has given an invite to the entire Facebook community to join the project. This page had more than 89,000 likes as of Sunday afternoon.
He is very excited about the new resolution and says, “I’ve found reading books very intellectually fulfilling. Books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today. I’m looking forward to shifting more of my media diet towards reading books.”
The first book on his list is Moisés Naím’s The End of Power, which “illuminates the struggle between once-dominant mega players and the new micro powers, challenging them in every field of human endeavor,” according to its description on Amazon. The Associated Press reported that the book commanded a sales ranking of 138 and was out of stock on Sunday on Amazon.com.
For choosing books, Oprah Winfrey remains the best benchmark, but there are few other clubs that exist as well. A few of them were started by Good Morning America and the Today show, among others.
What is Zuckerberg interested in reading?
Biographies, celebrity memoirs, science fiction and classics from ancient Greece and Rome are all part of Zuckerberg’s literary tastes. In many of his interviews, he has quoted from Virgil’s The Aeneid (his favorite book). The Facebook CEO has read a number of books such as Jay-Z’s Decoded, Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography of Albert Einstein, The Information from James Gleick (a science writer) and many others.
About 50,000 Facebook users gave suggestions to Zuckerberg on what his New Year’s resolution be. In previous years, resolutions for Zuckerberg included learning Mandarin Chinese and meeting a new person each day. This latest one of reading books appears to be a lot easier for the Facebook CEO and for his fans.
