1. Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance, Harper
2. Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, by Thomas L. Friedman, FSG – Debut
3. Our Revolution, by Bernie Sanders, Thomas Dunne Books
4. The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben, Greystone Books
5. Settle for More, by Megyn Kelly, Harper
6. Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah, Spiegel & Grau
7. Born to Run, by Bruce Springsteen, S&S
8. The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests, by Chris Smith, Grand Central – Debut
9. Upstream, by Mary Oliver, Penguin Press
10. Atlas Obscura, by Joshua Foer, et al., Workman
11. Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Spiegel & Grau
12. Killing the Rising Sun, by Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard, Holt
13. Scrappy Little Nobody, by Anna Kendrick, Touchstone
14. The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo, by Amy Schumer, Gallery
15. Cooking for Jeffrey, by Ina Garten, Clarkson Potter
On the Rise:
18. Absolutely on Music: Conversations, by Haruki Murakami, Seiji Ozawa, Knopf
A deeply personal and intimate conversation about music and writing between the internationally acclaimed bestselling author Haruki Murakami and his close friend Seiji Ozawa, the former conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
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.
