Bestselling books the week of 4/29/13, according to IndieBound*

What's selling best in independent bookstores across America.

2. HARDCOVER NONFICTION

1. Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls, by David Sedaris, Little Brown
2. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, by Michael Pollan, Penguin Press
3. Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg, Knopf
4. Gulp, by Mary Roach, Norton
5. I Could Pee on This, by Francesco Marciuliano, Chronicle
6. It's All Good, by Gwyneth Paltrow, Grand Central
7. Vader's Little Princess, by Jeffrey Brown, Chronicle
8. The Drunken Botanist, by Amy Stewart, Algonquin
9. Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, by Jeremy Scahill, Nation Books
10. My Beloved World, by Sonia Sotomayor, Knopf
11. Help, Thanks, Wow, by Anne Lamott, Riverhead
12. Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo, Random House
13. The Way of the Knife, by Mark Mazzetti, Penguin Press
14. Mom & Me & Mom, by Maya Angelou, Random House
15. Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, Random House

On the Rise:
22. The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England, by Dan Jones, Viking
 Brown's brilliantly entertaining new book looks at the era of chivalry, of Robin Hood and the Knights Templar, the Black Death, the founding of Parliament, the Black Prince, and the Hundred Year's War.

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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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