10 best books of June, according to The Christian Science Monitor

The Monitor's book reviewers are a diverse crowd and don't always see eye-to-eye. But they do know a good book when they see it. Here's what they most deeply appreciated this month. Let us know if you agree.

1. "And the Mountains Echoed," by Khaled Hosseini

Everyone was wondering: Would the author of the global sensation "The Kite Runner" be able to do it again? The answer is yes – and in fact Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini has only gotten better. "And the Mountains Echoed" is a novel told in the form of interlocking short stories. Chapters bounce from Kabul to Paris to the Greek Islands and back again, even as we catch glimpses of Afghanistan in time periods ranging from the 1970s till today. At the heart of the story is a pair of Afghan siblings separated as children, but Hosseini's real focal point – as in all his novels – is Afghanistan itself. You can read our full review here.

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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.”

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