5 novels you must read this fall

The best way to tell that fall has arrived is to take a look at the tables and shelves of your favorite bookstore. (Hi, Bookshop Santa Cruz!) If they’re utterly overflowing with fiction, fall – with its influx of major new releases – has arrived. So skip the leaf peeping, apple picking, and pumpkin carving (or at least put them on hold) and read something. You’ll thank me later.

1. 'The Dog Stars,' by Peter Heller

After a flu epidemic kills 99.7% of the population, our narrator Hig takes up residence on an airstrip with just his dog, Jasper, and one neighbor, a guns-and-weapons enthusiast named Bangley. Hig spends many of his days flying a small Cessna with Jasper as his co-pilot, patrolling the homestead that Hig and Bangley have staked for themselves and thinking about the life he had before. When he hears a voice come in over the radio, his hope and curiosity are ignited and Hig sets out to see what in his world still remains. A novel about no less than isolation, humanity, empathy, and need.

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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.”

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.

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