The Google Doodle book club: What to read, according to Google

Want to join Google’s book club? Look no further than its Doodles. Check out Google's reading list.

3. “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak

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Google honored children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak with a Doodle in June 20133.

One thing can be said with relative certainty about Google employees: They appreciate creativity and imagination. And what children’s author and illustrator better exemplifies these traits than the iconic Maurice Sendak?

Though Mr. Sendak passed away in 2012, Google decided to pay homage to this author on what would have been his 85th birthday in June 2013 with an animated Google Doodle. The circle begins with the "Where the Wild Things Are" protagonist, Max, in his wolf costume and crown, winding his way through his bedroom and into a magical forest, and continues through more of the author’s whimsical stories and settings.

What does this say about Google? Doodle illustrator Jennifer Hom explained that Sendak’s iconic works inspired creativity in all age groups.

“Whether they are monsters stomping through a forest, a boy cruising in a bread plane, or a parade of pigs celebrating a birthday, the unique characters of Sendak's books have sparked the imaginations of children for decades,” she writes.

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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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