10 best books of October: the Monitor's picks

Computers, canines, superheroes, and Civil War icons star in the Monitor's "10 best books of October" list.

10. "Some Luck," by Jane Smiley

Pulitzer Prize-winner Jane Smiley returns to Iowa with "Some Luck," the first novel in a planned trilogy about the generations of a farm family. In this first volume she follows the Langdon family and their five children from the 1920s through the 1950s, creating a credible and engrossing portrait of rural America in the mid-20th century. You can see a full review of "Some Luck" from the Monitor's site 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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