Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook book club

This year, Mark Zuckerberg is hoping you’ll stop constantly checking Facebook, at least long enough to read a few books. The CEO and founder of the popular social media site is starting a book club, and he’d like you to join him.

In a post on — wait for it — Facebook, Zuckerberg wrote, “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.” The first selection for the club will be Moisés Naím’s “The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be.” The book has already skyrocketed to No. 2 in economic books on Amazon, and No. 73 among all books sold by the online retailer, which has already sold out all its copies.

Zuckerberg said he chose the book because “[t]he 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.”

If the billionaire businessman is looking to become the publishing industry’s next Oprah Winfrey (or Bill Gates, who reviews books on his blog), he might be on the right track. His post announcing the book club has so far garnered almost 120,000 “likes,” and over 145,000 have given the thumbs up to the club’s official Facebook page, “A Year of Books.”

Zuckerberg hasn’t announced what the second book will be, but at CNN, author Jay Parini has a few suggestions, including Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” and Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” (A more likely choice for Zuckerberg would probably be “Lean In,” by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.)

This isn’t the first year Zuckerberg has given himself a New Year’s challenge. Some of his previous ones: learning Mandarin, writing “thank you” notes every day, and “[b]eing a vegetarian (or only eating meat if I killed the animal myself).”

Compared with mastering a complex language and going on frequent hunting trips, reading 26 books in a year sounds like a breeze.