How Mark Zuckerberg Chooses What to Read
Zuckerberg has been explicit about why he reads books rather than relying on faster media. Launching his 2015 reading project, he wrote that he had "found reading books very intellectually fulfilling," adding that "books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today." That preference for depth shapes his recommendations: they are rarely quick or fashionable. He set himself a rule to favor titles that teach about "different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies," which is why his list reaches across centuries and continents — from a medieval Arab historian to contemporary Chinese science fiction. The selection method is the recommendation: Zuckerberg endorses books that reward sustained, immersive attention over skimming.
Power, Institutions, and How the World Changes
The single strongest theme in Zuckerberg's recommendations is how power and institutions work. He opened his 2015 list with Moisés Naím's "The End of Power," writing that it "explores how the world is shifting to give individual people more power that was traditionally only held by large governments, militaries and other organizations" — and that "the trend towards giving people more power is one I believe in deeply." He paired it across the year with Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson's "Why Nations Fail," which argues that inclusive institutions, not geography or culture, determine prosperity, and Henry Kissinger's "World Order," a survey of how different civilizations have conceived of international order. For a platform founder, these are recommendations about the operating system of human society itself.
History and the Long View of Civilization
Zuckerberg repeatedly recommends books that zoom out to the scale of millennia. Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens" traces the entire arc of the human species and remains the breakout popular hit of his list. More strikingly, he recommended Ibn Khaldun's "The Muqaddimah," a 14th-century North African work often described as one of the earliest attempts at a science of history and society — a choice that signals genuine intellectual ambition rather than a publicist's safe pick. Matt Ridley's "Genome" tells human history through the lens of our 23 chromosomes. Together these recommendations reflect a reader trying to understand not the news cycle but the deep structures — biological, cultural, and institutional — that produce it.
Science, Progress, and Data-Driven Optimism
A streak of evidence-based optimism runs through Zuckerberg's recommendations. He praised Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" as "a timely book about how and why violence has steadily decreased throughout our history, and how we can continue this trend," and recommended Matt Ridley's "The Rational Optimist" in the same vein. On how knowledge itself advances, he picked Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" — the book that introduced the idea of paradigm shifts — and David Deutsch's "The Beginning of Infinity," an argument that progress is unbounded so long as we keep generating good explanations. He also recommended Vaclav Smil's "Energy: A Beginner's Guide," reflecting an engineer's appetite for understanding the physical systems that underpin civilization.
Where Fiction and Technology Meet
Although his recommendations are overwhelmingly nonfiction, the exceptions are telling. Iain M. Banks's "The Player of Games," part of the post-scarcity "Culture" series imagining a society run alongside benevolent superintelligent AIs, was the one true novel on his 2015 list. Liu Cixin's "The Three-Body Problem," a landmark of Chinese hard science fiction about first contact and civilizational risk, fit his stated goal of learning about other cultures while engaging big questions about technology's trajectory. He also recommended Jon Gertner's "The Idea Factory," a history of Bell Labs and how sustained investment in fundamental research produced the transistor and the information age. These picks connect Zuckerberg's reading directly to the questions a technology builder lives with: how research compounds, and where intelligent machines might take us.