Icelandic author Sjon – whose earlier books include "From the Mouth of a Whale" – follows protagonist Valdimar Haraldsson in this new novel. Haraldsson has come aboard a merchant ship in 1949 and while on board, he meets the second mate, a man who is actually the legendary hero Caeneus traveling in disguise. Caeneus tells the crew of his time with the Argonauts looking for the Golden Fleece. This story makes for a literary experience that Nelson compares to sitting next to a dinner companion who is telling you a long story that you only half-believe but which still entrances you. "It's kind of a retelling of Jason and the Golden Fleece and the Argonauts, but it's filtered through the narrative experience [of Valdimar]," she says.
Mark Sappenfield
Editor
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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