The Google Doodle book club: What to read, according to Google

Want to join Google’s book club? Look no further than its Doodles. Check out Google's reading list.

2. “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston

Google
The Google doodle today honors the legacy of the writer Zora Neale Hurston.

This Doodle from January 2014 was a groundbreaking choice for Google – it was the first US Google Doodle that featured a black female author. 

It was also another mark of literary permanency for Zora Neale Hurston, a complete transformation from where her novels stood when she died in 1960. She almost slipped into literary obscurity before being pioneered by Alice Walker, author of “The Color Purple,” who was struck by Ms. Hurston’s novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” for its colloquial writing style, ahead-of-its-time themes, and emphasis on folklore.

Google’s Doodle paid homage both to her work and the author herself. The Doodle featured an illustrated portrait of Hurston, framed by a lively paisley border, set against a central-Florida scene with palm trees, hanging moss, and a small pond, in reference to her childhood home and resting place near Eatonville, Fla.

Though an unconventional choice for Google, which tends toward white, male authors of classic novels, perhaps it signals the tech company’s commitment to diversity, and growing interest in taking people and ideas from relative obscurity and give them the attention Google believes they deserve (think the recent Nest or Boston Dynamics acquisition).

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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.”

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