10 books to read after the election

Are you a political junkie who's not quite ready for election season to end? Not to worry – the issues debated throughout the campaign haven't gone anywhere. If you're hoping to learn more about the challenges we'll still be facing in 2013, here are 10 new and upcoming books that might interest you.

1. 'The Politics of Voter Suppression: Defending and Expanding Americans’ Right to Vote,' by Tova Andrea Wang

Interested in learning more about the historical roots of efforts to decrease voter participation? It turns out that there isn’t anything new about voter suppression. It has roots that go back about 150 years, well before Jim Crow. Why are voter suppression tactics dominated by Republicans these days? Is voter fraud really a serious problem in US elections? How does voter suppression undermine the operations of a robust democratic society? And what can you do to help all eligible citizens exercise their voting rights? Learn answers to these questions and more from this timely book.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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