1. Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, Vintage
2. Proof of Heaven, by Eben Alexander, M.D., S&S
3. Quiet, by Susan Cain, Broadway
4. Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, by Anna Quindlen, Random House
5. Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, FSG
6. What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-One Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most, by Elizabeth Benedict (Ed.), Algonquin
7. Let's Pretend This Never Happened, by Jenny Lawson, Berkley
8. Why Does the World Exist?, by Jim Holt, Liveright
9. When Women Were Birds, by Terry Tempest Williams, Picador
10. Escape From Camp 14, by Blaine Harden, Penguin
11. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), by Mindy Kaling, Three Rivers
12. Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China, by Paul French, Penguin
13. Bossypants, by Tina Fey, Reagan Arthur Books
14. America the Beautiful, by Ben Carson, Zondervan
15. How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You, by Matthew Inman, Andrews McMeel
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.
