Bestselling books the week of 12/20/12, according to IndieBound*

What's selling best at independent bookstores across America.

1. HARDCOVER FICTION

1. Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver, Harper
 2. The Round House, by Louise Erdrich, Harper
 3. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, Crown
 4. The Casual Vacancy, by J.K. Rowling, Little Brown
 5. Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan, Nan A. Talese
 6. Dear Life, by Alice Munro, Knopf
 7. Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel, Holt
 8. The Racketeer, by John Grisham, Doubleday
 9. A Thousand Mornings, by Mary Oliver, Penguin Press
 10. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, by Ayana Mathis, Random House
 11. The Yellow Birds, by Kevin Powers, Little Brown
 12. The Black Box, by Michael Connelly, Little Brown
 13. The Art Forger, by B.A. Shapiro, Algonquin
 14. Winter of the World, by Ken Follett, Dutton
 15. NW, by Zadie Smith, Penguin Press

*Published Thursday, December 20, 2012 (for the sales week ended Sunday, December 16, 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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