7 books Mark Zuckerberg thinks everyone should read

Mark Zuckerberg is known to pick up a new hobby or side project each year. In the past, he has built an Artificially Intelligent personal assistant, learned to speak Mandarin, and vowed to meet one new person outside of Facebook every day. Reading books is also a hobby he has picked up over the years and even formed a Facebook-based book club to read one book every two weeks.

Here are some of Mark Zuckerberg’s suggestions for books he thinks everyone should read.

1. The Muqadimmah

by Ibn Khaldun

This book strips away biases of historical records and establishes the foundations of several fields of knowledge, including the philosophy of history, sociology, ethnography, and economics. Zuckerberg is a huge fan of the book and said this about it, “While much of what was believed then is now disproven after 700 more years of progress, it’s still very interesting to see what was understood at this time and the overall worldview when it’s all considered together.”

2. The Player of Games

by Iain M. Banks

The Player of Games is the second book in the sci-fi ‘Culture’ series and Zuckerberg picked it up for a change of pace. This book explores what life would look like if extremely advanced technology became more capable than us and began serving all our needs. This book is also a favorite of Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, “due to its entertaining way of exploring plausible advancements in technology.”

3. Why Nations Fail

by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

This book is an over of 15 years of research carried out by MIT economist Daren Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist James Robinson. Zuckerberg chose this book to better understand the origins of global poverty as it provides why some nations are extremely impoverished while others have a much better quality of life.

4. Portfolios of the Poor

by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven

This book provides an interesting and deep insight to the lives of nearly three billion people who survive on less than $2 a day and was written after 10 years of studying the financial lives of the lowest classes of Bangladesh, India, and South Africa. Zuckerberg’s main reason behind suggesting this book is so that more privileged people better understand the challenges faced by people who live under $2 a day and how to help them.

5. World Order

by Henry Kissinger

The author of this book is a well-renowned American diplomat and former Secretary of State. So when a person who comes from such high ranks of power talks about the ‘world order’, people listen. So did Mark Zuckerberg. While talking about the book, he said that it is about “foreign relations and how we can build peaceful relationships throughout the world.”

6. Sapiens

by Yuval Noah Harari

If you want to understand how far humankind has come, this book will draw a brilliant picture – right from the cave man days to modern times. “Following the Muqaddimah, which was a history from the perspective of an intellectual in the 1300s, ‘Sapiens’ is a contemporary exploration of many similar questions”, Zuckerberg wrote after reading the book.

7. The Beginning of Infinity

by David Deutsch

This book is for science nerds who want to read up on the progress we have made since the Scientific Revolution. It covers diverse topics like art, science, philosophy, history, politics, evil, death, the future – everything.

[Source – Business Insider, Image Source – Amazon]