Bestselling books the week of 1/12/12, according to IndieBound*

What's selling best in independent bookstores across America.

1. HARDCOVER FICTION

1. Death Comes to Pemberley, by P.D. James, Knopf
 2. The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes, Knopf
 3. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Stieg Larsson, Knopf
 4. State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett, Harper
 5. 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, Knopf
 6. The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides
 7. 11/22/63, by Stephen King, Scribner
 8. The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain, Ballantine
 9. The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern, Doubleday
 10. Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward, Bloomsbury
 11. The Litigators, by John Grisham, Doubleday
 12. A Dance With Dragons, by George R.R. Martin, Bantam
 13. The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje, Knopf
 14. The Leopard, by Jo Nesbø, Knopf
 15. The Drop, by Michael Connelly, Little Brown

ON THE RISE:

19. Breakdown by Sara Paretsky, Putnam
 V.I. Warshawski investigates the murder of a man found stabbed through the heart in a vampire-style slaying.

Published Thursday, January 12, 2012 (for the sales week ended Sunday, January 8, 2012). Based on reporting from many hundreds of independent bookstores across the United States. For information on more titles, please visit IndieBound.org

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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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