1. Camino Island, by John Grisham, Doubleday
2. Into the Water, by Paula Hawkins, Riverhead
3. Magpie Murders, by Anthony Horowitz, Harper
4. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, by Arundhati Roy, Knopf
5. A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles, Viking
6. Norse Mythology, by Neil Gaiman, Norton
7. Dragon Teeth, by Michael Crichton, Harper
8. The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead, Doubleday
9. The Identicals, by Elin Hilderbrand, Little Brown
10. Men Without Women, by Haruki Murakami, Knopf
11. The Little French Bistro, by Nina George, Crown
12. Anything Is Possible, by Elizabeth Strout, Random House
13. Testimony, by Scott Turow, Grand Central
14. No Middle Name, by Lee Child, Delacorte Press
15. The Essex Serpent, by Sarah Perry, Custom House
Mark Sappenfield
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.
