Bestselling books the week of 12/5/13, according to IndieBound*

What's selling best at independent bookstores across America.

1. HARDCOVER FICTION

1. The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, Little Brown
2. Dog Songs, by Mary Oliver, Penguin Press
3. Aimless Love, by Billy Collins, Random House
4. Sycamore Row, by John Grisham, Doubleday
5. The Valley of Amazement, by Amy Tan, Ecco
6. The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton, Little Brown
7. The Circle, by Dave Eggers, Knopf
8. S., by J.J. Abrams, Doug Dorst, Mulholland
9. The First Phone Call From Heaven, by Mitch Albom, Harper
10. The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri, Knopf
11. The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert, Viking
12. We Are Water, by Wally Lamb, Harper
13. Doctor Sleep, by Stephen King, Scribner
14. The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride, Riverhead
15. The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon, by Alexander McCall Smith, Pantheon

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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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