Bestselling books the week of 8/20/15, according to IndieBound*

What's selling best in America's independent bookstores this week?

2. HARDCOVER NONFICTION

1. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo, Ten Speed Press
2. Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Spiegel & Grau
3. The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough, S&S
4. Modern Romance, by Aziz Ansari, Penguin Press
5. Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande, Metropolitan
6. Dead Wake, by Erik Larson, Crown
7. Sick in the Head, by Judd Apatow, Random House
8. H Is for Hawk, by Helen MacDonald, Grove Press
9. The Oregon Trail, by Rinker Buck, S&S
10. Plunder and Deceit, by Mark R. Levin, Threshold Editions
11. Barbarian Days, by William Finnegan, Penguin Press
12. The Road to Character, by David Brooks, Random House
13. Yes Please, by Amy Poehler, Dey Street
14. Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Disney Little Golden Book, by Diane Muldrow, Random House/Disney
15. A Full Life, by Jimmy Carter, S&S
On the Rise:
18. You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost): A Memoir, by Felicia Day, Touchstone
Online entertainment mogul Day's funny, quirky, and inspiring memoir is an August 2015 Indie Next List Great Read.

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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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