Who would imagine that Mark Zuckerberg’s recommendation for a book to take on holiday might plunge the reader into a world of cut-throat technological competition and the pursuit of monopoly? Apparently not those who have seized on the Facebook co-founder’s choice of The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore, which describes the race to bring electricity to the US and the consequent riches up for grabs. Indeed, it has been taken as a manifestation of Zuckerberg’s inability to conceal his true drive to world domination, an inadvertent drop of the mask.

To which one might reply: did you think he was sitting on his sunlounger reading through the works of Barbara Pym?

Zuckerberg, after all, is the man who last year came up with 23 titles for a Facebook-centred book club, among which were Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, which isolates the tendency to trade in markets as a key human trait, Henry Kissinger’s World Order and, a little surprisingly, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. Mr Light Read he ain’t.

We see in the choices of the Silicon Valley supremos something subtly sinister and manifesto-like

Nor, in fairness, is Angela Merkel, whose choice of Tyrant, an analysis of Shakespeare’s exploration of power and totalitarianism by the scholar Stephen Greenblatt, has also come to light as she takes a holiday in the Italian Alps. What might possibly have led her to this fascinating choice?

Merkel was actually engaged in a private act of reading, not sharing her choices with the world, unlike the Silicon Valley head honchos who joined Zuckerberg: the Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, for example, who is reading a memoir by the founder of Nike, or Sheryl Sandberg, deep into Melinda Gates’s The Moment of Lift. (Side question: is it an article of faith that all these guys have to read each others’ books? Do you get drummed out of the gazillionaires’ philanthropy clubhouse if you don’t?)

This all seems a long way from the more genteel business of writers taking to the pages of weekend newspapers in order to suggest toothsome thrillers and haunting memoirs to fill the (often mythical) hours of peace and contemplation that summer promises. Certainly, it doesn’t recall Barack Obama’s championing of the novelist Marilynne Robinson, or his description of rereading VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas following the author’s death, or his raving about Tara Westover’s Educated.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Barack Obama’s talent was to come across as a genuine reader who happened to be president.’ Photograph: Olivier Douliery/Getty Images

But there is a difference between the way in which those recommendations are received, and what we like to read in to the bookish lives of those we see as wielding immense – and often covert – power over us. Obama’s talent was to come across as a genuine reader who happened to be president; whereas we see in the choices of the Silicon Valley supremos something more subtly sinister and manifesto-like, keener to shape our tastes and attitudes.

In truth, this is probably rubbish. Those endless screeds of business books, corporate memoirs or historico-cultural overview? They’re more likely to be a mixture of what Zuckerberg et al are actually reading, the result of a quick scan of the no doubt numerous new books that flood through the door, or the work of a bright-eyed assistant charged with coming up with a relevant and happening title. They are less likely to be a carefully coded way of getting us to accept a new world vision. That, sadly, is done in infinitely less obvious ways.

Back on this side of the pond, we are all still too traumatised by the memory of Dominic Raab giving a TV interview in front of a windowsill on which were horizontally stacked such weighty tomes as a book by Niall Ferguson and a massive biography of Richard Nixon to wonder what the Westminster ne’er-do-wells are reading. (Why were these tedious-looking doorstops arranged like that? Why is he spending time reading when he doesn’t know where Calais is?)

Presumably No 10 is now locked in a battle between Boris Johnson attempting to give everyone who crosses the threshold a copy of his execrable novel Seventy-Two Virgins and Dominic Cummings confiscating them and handing out photostats of the best of his blog. In the interests of public service journalism, I think we should be told.

• Alex Clark writes for the Guardian and the Observer