10 best books of December 2014 as selected by Amazon's editors

Looking for a great read this holiday season – for you or for a loved one? Amazon editors have chosen what they think are the best titles being released this month. Here's the full list of their choices with thoughts from Amazon editorial director Sara Nelson.

1. 'Moriarty,' by Anthony Horowitz

"The House of Silk" writer Horowitz returns to the world of Sherlock Holmes, except this story takes place after the final encounter between the detective and his enemy at Reichenbach Falls. Pinkerton agent Frederick Chase and Scotland Yard investigator Athelney Jones team up to try to find the criminal who seems to be attempting to take over Professor Moriarty's position as leader of the criminal underworld. "He manages to sort of channel the original voice [of "Sherlock Holmes" author Arthur Conan Doyle]," Nelson says of Horowitz. She calls the book "very fun."

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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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