10 best books of August 2016, according to Amazon's editors

As you enjoy the last of the summer sun, you need a great book to bring out to the lawn chair or for the weekend trip. Need some inspiration? These are the titles Amazon editors say are the best to be released this month. Here's the full list with thoughts from Amazon senior editor Chris Schluep.

1. 'Another Brooklyn,' by Jacqueline Woodson

"Brown Girl Dreaming" author Woodson's new novel features a protagonist named August, who encounters an old acquaintance and looks back at her childhood in 1970s Brooklyn. "She's an absolutely beautiful writer," Schluep says of Woodson. "She conveys so much in just a few sentences."

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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.

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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.”

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