10 best books of March, according to Amazon's editors

Eager for a gripping new read with which to begin the month of March? Try a memoir, suggests Amazon editorial director Sara Nelson. While March offers some excellent fiction and other good reads as well (see the list that follows), Nelson says that the memoir-biography category is particularly rich this month. In a recent Monitor interview, she explained why Amazon is touting these books as the month's best.

1. "Wave," by Sonali Deraniyagala

This short but powerful memoir is Amazon's Spotlight Book for March. "It is one of the most moving things that I have ever read," says Nelson. "Wave" tells the true story of the 2004 vacation during which Deraniyagala was the only member of her family to survive a tsunami. The book begins as Deraniyagala finds herself alive and begins looking for her husband, sons, and parents. As the years pass, she writes about coming to accept her loss. Nelson says that Deraniyagala is able to powerfully bring her young sons back to life through her prose. "The more she realizes that they are dead," says Nelson, "the more they come to life in her writing."

1 of 11

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.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.