Zuckerberg’s Book Club

What do Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and media maven Orpah Winfrey have in common? Well, probably more than a little, but what we’re looking at today is Zuckerberg’s newest venture: a book club.

Zuckerberg started out his Facebook year by announcing that his “challenge for 2015 is to read a new book every other week -- with an emphasis on learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies.”

The first book mentioned on Zuckerberg’s newly created Facebook page A Year of Books is The End of Power by Moisés Naím (Basic Books, 2013). Subtitled From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be, “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,” Zuck writes. “The trend towards giving people more power is one I believe in deeply, and I’m looking forward to reading this book and exploring this in more detail.”

Since The End of Power was in Amazon’s number 86 position at time of writing, it would seem likely that Zuckerberg’s literary pronouncements might pack the same wallop Oprah’s did at the height of her powers in the 1990s.

The Bill Gates Book Club

What do Oprah Winfrey, Jon Stewart and Bill Gates have in common? Aside from drive, passion and a certain geeky charisma, all three have created themselves as literary stylemakers almost as a by-product of the other -- much more visible things -- they do.

Bill Gates reading.

Oprah started it, of course: offering her reading choices with Oprah’s Book Club beginning in the late 1990s, instantly creating author celebrities while making reading newly cool. (Thank you, Oprah!)

Jon Stewart’s cachet at the head of his particular niche of the literati was slower blooming, but bloom it did and these days a talk spot on The Daily Show (which isn’t) pretty much guarantees a leap to the bestseller list and competition for Jon’s attention is understandably high.

The newest reading choices being offered up from the geek elite are coming from Bill Gates, the guy who (ahem) gifted us with the Windows operating system. On his blog, Gates not only shares what he is and will be reading, he also selects a title for future review, then asks readers to read along while he makes his assessment. His most recent review, of Jared Dianomd’s The World Until Yesterday (Viking), was posted on Gates’ blog earlier this week:

The World Until Yesterday made me think about how we have had to overcome some deeply ingrained behaviors in order to develop a modern, interconnected society. As Diamond explains, in a hunter-gatherer society, you trust people in your own group because you know for the most part they share your interests. But when you encounter strangers, you have to assume they’re dangerous. You have a strong incentive to do this: If you don’t, and you turn out to be wrong, they could end up killing you or stealing your food. 

Things are different in a modern society. You probably passed by a lot of strangers today without having to figure out whether they might try to kill you or take your lunch. That is a very primal fear we have overcome in order to live in large cities.

Consider how important this has been for global trade and international travel. How many strangers have to do business with each other every day to make the global economy work? Although globalization has been driven by inventions like the jet engine and the standardized shipping container, it wouldn’t be happening unless we were also able to overcome a natural suspicion of strangers. It is another reminder of humans’ amazing ability to adapt.

There are other, deeper observations. As well, Gates invites readers to add their own thoughts, while promising to review other selections from his summer reading list in future. Among them, Patriot and Assassin (Royal Wulff Publishing) by Robert Cook. “A friend of mine gave me this novel and insisted that I read it,” Gates writes. “It’s a thriller about terrorists plotting an attack on U.S. soil. I don’t generally read a lot of fiction. I think The Hunger Games was the last novel I read. I bet this one will involve less archery.”

One would hope!

You can see all eight of Gates’ selections here.

Oprah’s Book Club: Enlighten This

We don’t have a lot to say about Oprah’s latest choice for her book club. It’s not that we have anything against “waking up to a new, enlightened mind-set” or even “seeking a more loving self and a more loving planet” but, let’s face it, Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now and, more recently, A New Earth, can’t really fill the literary footsteps he’ll be treading as part of this club.

C’mon: Gabriel García Márquez, Cormac MacCarthy, Ken Follett, Toni Morrison, Wally Lamb, Maya Angelou… and Eckhart Tolle? See what I’m saying? I’m not even sure we’re talking about the same planet, never mind the same league.

Still, a lot of people will care about Oprah and Eckhart’s New Earth Web Event. I’m just not so sure why they’d bother stacking it with the really great literature -- and even the kinda questionable literature that was still nonetheless literature -- Oprah has included in her book club in the past. Please, Oprah: next time? Give us a real book.

On The Road with Oprah

We told you it was coming, and now it’s here. Amid a great rush of fanfare, Oprah has made her choice. The author is brilliant and celebrated and the book in question was adored by both critics and readers when it was released last fall, but the story of a father and son coming to grips with each other and life in a post-apocalyptic America still seems an odd choice for Oprah. Says Popmatters:

What seems to have been a nuclear winter has settled over the world, leaving little in its wake. There are references to the immediate aftermath, when “the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded ... creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland ... The frailty of everything revealed at last.” By the time The Road is set, however, even those years are a distant memory, the only people the father and son come across are best avoided, desperate creatures with little left to eat but each other.

The California Literary Review seemed almost to go into raptures stretching for the right -- and sufficient -- praise for the book:

Post apocalyptic novels are a dark, bleak and often illuminating genre that are highlighted by titles that include The Day of the Triffids, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Eternity Road, On The Beach and Galapagos. J.G. Ballard carved out a large section of this wasted landscape with The Crystal World, The Drowning World, The Burning World and The Wind From Nowhere. But among all of these fine works and dozens more I’ve read, none compares, holds a candle to or rings such gloomy, bleak chords as does Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; all accomplished with an economy of words that is beautiful in its execution.

And I love this line from the same review. How could you not? “I read this book in one take late at night and immediately headed downstairs to kick up the fire and drink some bourbon. I was cold, chilled emotionally, stunned, awe-struck by McCarthy’s words.”

But on Oprah’s Web site, the motivation for choosing The Road becomes more clear. Not only is it a wonderful book, it’s one that invites conversation and even discussion, like the kind Oprah asks for on her book club Web site. “What do you think destroyed the world? How far would you go to protect your child? What is the difference between ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’? Share your thoughts with others on the message board.”

Though his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965, McCarthy, 73, is perhaps best known for 1992’s All the Pretty Horses. And the book did very well on its own, long before the release of the movie based on the work came out in 2000 starring Matt Damon, Henry Thomas and Penelope Cruz.

McCarthy is notoriously private and has only rarely granted interviews. An interview with the writer is promised, however. It will be interesting to see how the interaction between the Chicago media maven and the reclusive literary giant unfolds.

Stop the Presses: Oprah Will Choose

Everyone’s talking about it. Forbes. AP. The Charlotte Observer. It must be a big hairy deal.

Windy City multimedia maven Oprah Winfrey will make a new selection for her book club. On Wednesday. And, apparently, the world is holding it’s breath.

A new Oprah book club pick will be announced Wednesday on her television talk show, the same day Winfrey hosts the author of her current selection, Academy Award-winning actor Sidney Poitier.

More details when she actually, you know, chooses.

And while we’re talking about Oprah, people who care about such things will be interested to learn that a former intern to Oprah’s production company has been named Miss USA. It’s kind of too bad for her. The headlines have gotten skewed. Instead of blasting “Rachel Smith Wins Miss USA” media outlets like ABC are saying “Ex-Oprah Intern Crowned Miss USA.” Funny old world, when the biggest part of a story about a pageant winner is which media mogul she doesn’t work for anymore.

Details are here.