Bestselling books the week of 8/23/12, according to IndieBound*

What's selling best in independent bookstores across America.

1. HARDCOVER FICTION

1. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, Crown
 2. Broken Harbor, by Tana French, Viking
 3. The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller, Knopf
 4. A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers, McSweeney's
 5. Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter, Harper
 6. Shadow of Night, by Deborah Harkness, Viking
 7. The Light Between Oceans, by M.L. Stedman, Scribner
 8. A Dance With Dragons, by George R.R. Martin, Bantam
 9. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce, Random House
 10. The Fallen Angel, by Daniel Silva, Harper
 11. Where'd You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple, Little Brown
 12. The Kingmaker's Daughter, by Philippa Gregory, Touchstone
 13. Mission to Paris, by Alan Furst, Random House
 14. In the Shadow of the Banyan, by Vaddey Ratner, S&S
 15. Canada, by Richard Ford, Ecco

*Published Thursday, August 23, 2012 (for the sales week ended Sunday, August 19, 2012). Based on reporting from many hundreds of independent bookstores across the United States. For information on more titles, please visit IndieBound.org

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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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