Bestselling books the week of 1/5/12, according to IndieBound*

What's selling best in independent bookstores across America.

3. TRADE PAPERBACK FICTION

1. The Tiger's Wife, by Téa Obreht, Random House
 2. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, Berkley
 3. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson, Vintage
 4. Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell, Vintage
 5. A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, Anchor
 6. Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese, Vintage
 7. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, Mariner
 8. The Girl Who Played With Fire, by Stieg Larsson, Vintage
 9. Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, Picador
 10. Sarah's Key, by Tatiana De Rosnay, St. Martin's Griffin
 11. Room, by Emma Donoghue, Back Bay
 12. The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein, Harper
 13. A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness, Penguin
 14. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carré, Penguin
 15. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, by Helen Simonson, Random House

ON THE RISE:
 17. The House at Tyneford, by Natasha Solomons, Plume
 A young Jewish woman is forced to flee 1938 Vienna and becomes a parlor maid in England.

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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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