The first book Zuckerberg is reading is one that all kinds of movers and shakers have read to help them be the best they can be, or even better than that. Books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today.” Deeper, cynics might suggest, than going to a Facebook friend’s page and liking their pix of Christmas puddings. “I’ve found reading books very intellectually fulfilling. “I’m excited for my reading challenge,” he says.

The Facebook CEO has just set himself a challenge, to read a book a week in 2015 and has set up a web page, as a kind of online book club, where he will discuss the improving volumes he reads. No, what we need to read is the kind of book recommended by Mark Zuckerberg this week. This sort of defeatist stuff may have got its late author shortlisted for the Booker, but it’s functionally useless if we want to be, as we must in 2015, masters of the universe. For Christmas, I got Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop, her fictional account of a sympathetic but undeniably mousy and entrepreneurially inept woman trying to establish the eponymous business in a dismal-sounding Suffolk seaside town but failing in the face of ruthless local opposition – not to mention poltergeists who may or may not be loosening the screws to her bookshelves. E ver wondered why neither you nor I are world leaders or sitting pretty atop the rich lists of either Forbes magazine or the Sunday Times? Most likely it’s because we are reading the wrong books.

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