The 2015 'A Year of Books' Challenge: What It Was and Why It Mattered
On January 2, 2015, Zuckerberg posted his New Year's resolution: "My challenge for 2015 is to read a new book every other week — with an emphasis on learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies." He created a public Facebook group called A Year of Books where followers could read along and discuss each selection, drawing enormous participation. He explained his motivation in the same post: "Books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today." The initiative became, briefly, one of the most visible book clubs in the world, driving several titles onto bestseller lists almost overnight. The End of Power, his first selection, sold out on Amazon within days.
The Complete A Year of Books List: 23 Titles Across 12 Disciplines
Over 2015, Zuckerberg selected 23 books covering an unusually wide range: The End of Power by Moises Naim (power shifting from institutions to individuals), The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker (the decline of violence), Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (a macro-history of humankind), Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson (the institutional roots of prosperity), Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull (building creative culture at Pixar), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (how paradigms shift), The Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun (14th-century world history), The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (race and justice), The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (science fiction from China), and many others. In his year-end reflection, Zuckerberg wrote that reading had given him "more perspective on a number of topics — from science to religion, from poverty to prosperity ... and from history to futuristic fiction."
Zuckerberg's Focus: Understanding Cultures, Power, and Systems
A pattern runs through his selections that goes beyond curiosity. Zuckerberg consistently chose books that explain how societies organize themselves — why some nations accumulate wealth while others stay poor, how religious belief shapes collective action, how empires rise and fall. The inclusion of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah is revealing. In his June 1, 2015 post, Zuckerberg described it as "a history of the world written by an intellectual who lived in the 1300s" that "focuses on how society and culture flow, including the creation of cities, politics, commerce and science." He added that even where its claims have since been disproven, "it's still very interesting to see what was understood at this time." This willingness to engage pre-modern thinkers on their own terms signals a reader who prioritizes range over comfortable consensus.
Beyond the Challenge: Zuckerberg's Broader Reading Life
The 2015 challenge was a concentrated experiment, not his entire reading identity. Before and after, Zuckerberg has publicly recommended books outside that list, including Andy Grove's High Output Management — which he said "played a big role in shaping my management style" — Peter Thiel's Zero to One, Ben Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. He also hosted a live public conversation with Yuval Noah Harari in April 2019, revisiting themes from Sapiens around technology and the future of society. His reading has never been confined to business and technology; the presence of social science, fiction, and philosophy on the same list signals a reader building mental models across many domains simultaneously.
What Readers Can Take From Zuckerberg's Approach
The structural lesson is deliberate breadth. Rather than reading deeper into an existing area of expertise, Zuckerberg used books to systematically reduce ignorance about domains he did not yet understand — criminal justice, Islamic intellectual history, energy systems, evolutionary biology. Setting a concrete biweekly cadence created external accountability: announcing each selection publicly meant completing the book was a social commitment, not just a private intention. His year-end post noted the challenge left him with "a greater sense of hope and optimism." For professionals who want similar results, the takeaway is simple: pick a reading cadence, choose books outside your comfort zone, and make the commitment visible to someone other than yourself.
