Bestselling books the week of 10/17/13, according to IndieBound*

What's selling best at independent bookstores across America.

2. HARDCOVER NONFICTION

1. David and Goliath, by Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown
2. Killing Jesus, by Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard, Holt
3. I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, by Malala Yousafzai, Little Brown
4. One Summer: America, 1927, by Bill Bryson, Doubleday
5. Zealot, by Reza Aslan, Random House
6. The Reason I Jump, by Naoki Higashida, Random House
7. Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Little Golden Book, by Diane Muldrow, Golden Books
8. I Could Pee on This, by Francesco Marciuliano, Chronicle
9. Guinness World Records 2014, by Guinness World Records
10. William Shakespeare's Star Wars, by Ian Doescher, Quirk
11. My Story, by Elizabeth Smart, Chris Stewart, St. Martin's
12. The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown, Viking
13. Tip and the Gipper, by Chris Matthews, S&S
14. Grumpy Cat: A Grumpy Book, by Grumpy Cat, Chronicle
15. Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg, Knopf

On the Rise:
20. Survival Lessons, by Alice Hoffman, Algonquin
Bestselling author Hoffman shares her suggestions for finding beauty in the world even during the toughest times.

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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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