By the Book (28 page)

When and where do you like to read? Paper or electronic?

I probably shouldn't admit this since I work in the tech industry, but I still prefer reading paper books. (In
Lean In
, I also admit that I carry a notebook and pen around to keep track of my to-do list, which, at Facebook, is like carrying around a stone tablet and chisel.) I travel with an iPad, but at home I like holding a book open and being able to leaf through it, highlight with a real yellow pen, and dog-ear important pages. After I finish a book, I'll often look to see how many page corners are turned down as one gauge of how much I liked it. I also still read newspapers and magazines the old-fashioned way; I tried the Kindle app for the iPad on the elliptical, but when you get sweaty, you can't turn the pages.

Are you a fast or slow reader? How many books would you say you read in a year?

I am painfully slow and don't get through nearly as many books as I want to. I pile them up on my night stand, and when the piles start tipping over, I force myself to speed up or to give up on the ones that, realistically, I am never going to get to.

Recommend the best business book you've read in recent years.

Now, Discover Your Strengths
, by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton. This book has been instrumental in how we think about developing talent at Facebook. Like all organizations, we have a system for giving feedback to our employees. A few years ago, Lori Goler, Facebook's head of human resources, brought Marcus to meet with our leadership team to help us improve this system. Marcus and his colleagues surveyed employees for twenty-five years to figure out what factors predict extraordinary performance. They found that the most important predictor of the success of a company or division was how many people answered yes to the question “Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?” And this makes sense. Most performance reviews focus more on “development areas” (a.k.a. weaknesses) than strengths. People are told to work harder and get better at those areas, but people don't have to be good at everything. At Facebook, we try to be a strengths-based organization, which means we try to make jobs fit around people rather than make people fit around jobs. We focus on what people's natural strengths are and spend our management time trying to find ways for them to use those strengths every day.

And what's the best book about technology? Is there a book that really gets Silicon Valley right?

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
, by Eric Ries, provides a great inside look at how the tech industry approaches building products and businesses. Traditionally, companies have depended on elaborate business plans and in-depth tests to put out a “perfect” product. Ries advocates that for tech, a better way to perfect a product is to introduce it to the market and get customers using it and giving feedback, so you can learn and then iterate. (Facebook figured out this approach long ago. We even have posters all over our buildings that remind people, “Stay Focused & Keep Shipping.”)

Who are your favorite authors?

Michael Lewis's ability to boil down the most complicated subjects is like a magic trick. You can't believe your eyes. He takes on important issues—from the 2008 Wall Street crash in
The Big Short
to parenting in
Home Game
—and breaks them down to their deepest truths. His combination of an extraordinary analytical mind and a deep understanding of human nature allows him to weave together data and events to offer a fresh and insightful narrative. Whatever the topic, the result is always compelling and even thrilling. I am in awe of him.

Somewhere in that pile of books on my night stand sits a well-worn copy of Anna Quindlen's
A Short Guide to a Happy Life
. I've read it before—and I will read it again—and just knowing it's at my bedside gives me comfort. Her wisdom resonates for me on the deepest level: “But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on the bus, or in the car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart.” Perfect.

I can't list my favorite authors without including my college roommate Caroline Weber. I love her books because I hear about them from start to finish—with the many ups and downs that go into publishing. Much of what she writes is for the comp lit crowd—not tech execs—but she is always willing to explain passages to me. In 2007, she published the brilliant and fun
Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution
. There are few books that I have enjoyed as much. And while I admit I'm biased, it's not just me—
The Washington Post
Book World
named it one of the best books of the year.

How do you organize your personal library? Do you hold on to all books or do you like to streamline?

My husband is a streamliner; I am a pack rat. I've even hung on to all my textbooks from college—you know, just in case I have the sudden urge to read Schopenhauer's
The World as Will and Representation
.

What are your most cherished books, and where do you keep them?

I keep my books from Helen Vendler's college class on American poets in my night stand (inside the drawer, not to be confused with the stack piled up on top). Professor Vendler says that you don't own a poem until you memorize it, and I agree. Every year my New Year's resolution is to meditate for just five minutes a day. I never do it, but when I recite one of the poems I memorized, I think it comes close to having the same effect.

What book should every business executive read?

Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values
, by Fred Kofman, had a profound effect on my career and life. I think about his lessons almost every day—the importance of authentic communication, impeccable commitments, being a player not a victim, and taking responsibility. I have given this book to so many team members at work, and I've seen it inspire people overnight to be more aware of their actions and impact on others.

What were your favorite books as a child? Do you have a favorite character or hero from one of those books? Is there one book you wish all children would read?

I wanted to be Meg Murry, the admittedly geeky heroine of
A Wrinkle in Time
, by Madeleine L'Engle. I loved how she worked with others to fight against an unjust system and how she fought to save her family against very long odds. I was also captivated by the concept of time travel. I keep asking Facebook's engineers to build me a tesseract so I, too, could fold the fabric of time and space. But so far no one has even tried.

Choosing one book (and album) for all children to read is easy: Marlo Thomas's
Free to Be You and Me
. Its messages are—sadly—still relevant today, but its stories are beautifully written.

What books have you enjoyed reading with your own children? Is there a book you particularly love to read to them?

I cherish the day my daughter learned to recite “Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too” from Shel Silverstein's
Where the Sidewalk Ends
. Just thinking about it makes me smile. And both my kids first learned to understand numbers from Silverstein's poem “Smart.”

If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?

I would love to meet J. K. Rowling and tell her how much I admire her writing and am amazed by her imagination. I read every Harry Potter book as it came out and looked forward to each new one. I am rereading them now with my kids and enjoying them every bit as much. She made me look at jelly beans in a whole new way.

Sheryl Sandberg
is the chief operating officer at Facebook and the author of
Lean In
.

Caroline Kennedy

What was the best book you read last year?

The most shocking book I read last year was
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
, by Douglas Blackmon. I hadn't heard of it when I picked it up even though it won the Pulitzer Prize a couple of years ago, so I was doubly shocked by the story it tells. The detailed chronicle of the institutional scale of horrific oppression and criminal behavior by local government and corporate interests was truly jaw-dropping, although it probably shouldn't have been.

The best fiction book I read was
The Yellow Birds
, by the Iraq war veteran Kevin Powers, which is about to get the PEN/Hemingway Award. That's especially nice as the award will be presented at the JFK Library by Patrick Hemingway (Ernest Hemingway's son), because Hemingway's papers are located there.

Your favorite book of all time?

An impossible question. Two books that made me cry real tears were
Jude the Obscure
, by Thomas Hardy, and
A Death in the Family
, by James Agee. Two books that made me laugh out loud were
A Confederacy of Dunces
, by John Kennedy Toole, and
Lucky Jim
, by Kingsley Amis.

When and where do you like to read?

I am not picky—if possible I would like to read in Rome or Paris, but since that's usually not an option, I like to read in bed.

Paper or electronic?

I tried electronic, but I couldn't remember anything—maybe that's because it was
The Gnostic Gospels
, by Elaine Pagels—but probably it's because I am getting old—so I am now mostly going back to paper. I like to dog-ear important pages, and I don't know how to do that on my iPad.

Who are your favorite poets? Was there a particular poet you encountered early on who inspired your love of poetry?

One of the best things about creating poetry anthologies is that I have gotten to know some incredible poets whose work I admire. Sharon Olds, Elizabeth Alexander, and Naomi Shihab Nye write about contemporary life and relationships. They have introduced me to poems I would not otherwise have read and deepened my understanding of poets like Lucille Clifton and Gwendolyn Brooks.

What's your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

Books about the Inquisition and the Crusades are a guilty pleasure because I feel guilty reading bad things about the Catholic Church—though it's hard to avoid these days. Biographies of famous horses and lives of the saints are among my favorite literary genres.

What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life
, by Nick Lane, and lots of books about networks, physics, and neurobiology—they belong to my husband.

What's the best book you've ever received as a gift?

Gender Outlaw
, by Kate Bornstein. I got it for my birthday last year from my daughter after a family discussion on the merits of transgender surgery. It's a fascinating and illuminating memoir by a transgender playwright.

Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?

I don't read much self-help—that comes from talking to people or taking a hot bath. I do read historically oriented books about religion and faith like Edith Hamilton's
Witness to the Truth
, which I found in our apartment and had belonged to my mother; or Garry Wills's
What the Gospels Meant
, which I bought in an airport. I really enjoyed
God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible
, by Adam Nicolson, and
The Cistercian World: Monastic Writings of the Twelfth Century
, which my daughter brought home from college.

Where do you get your books? Do you have a favorite bookstore or library?

I love independent bookstores and always get great recommendations from the staff there. I have gotten to visit amazing ones on my book tours—like Parnassus in Nashville, Anderson's near Chicago, Elliott Bay in Seattle. At home, a lot of the small bookstores have disappeared in my neighborhood, but Crawford Doyle is great. I also love going into a huge Barnes & Noble just to wander around and find things I wasn't looking for.

What's the best book you've read about the law? Was there a particular book that influenced you as an attorney?

In law school and for the research on my two books on constitutional law, I really enjoyed reading cases and found some of them to be beautifully written. First Amendment writings by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (dissent in
Abrams v. U.S.
), Louis Brandeis (concurrence in
Whitney v. California
), and Robert Jackson (
West Virginia v. Barnette
) are ones that all Americans can understand and be inspired by. I haven't read many books about the law—but two interesting ones are
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
, by Kevin Boyle, the story of the highly publicized trial of a black doctor who tried to move into a white neighborhood and was defended by Clarence Darrow; and
The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold
, by Geoffrey Robertson. That was the first trial of a head of state for waging war against his own people, and all the prominent lawyers left town rather than be chosen to prosecute the king. A little-known attorney, John Cooke, who eventually brought the case, showed tremendous courage and was himself beheaded by Charles II. It's also interesting because it was written by a British human rights attorney who is defending Julian Assange.