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

What's selling best at independent bookstores across America.

2. HARDCOVER NONFICTION

1. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, by Jon Meacham, Random House
 2. Help, Thanks, Wow, by Anne Lamott, Riverhead
 3. Barefoot Contessa Foolproof, by Ina Garten, Clarkson Potter
 4. America Again, by Stephen Colbert, Grand Central
 5. Killing Kennedy, by Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard, Holt
 6. Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo, Random House
 7. I Could Pee on This, by Francesco Marciuliano, Chronicle
 8. Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, Knopf
 9. Waging Heavy Peace, by Neil Young, Blue Rider
 10. The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, by Deb Perelman, Knopf
 11. The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver, Penguin Press
 12. Killing Lincoln, by Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard, Holt
 13. The Patriarch, by David Nasaw, Penguin Press
 14. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, by William Manchester, Paul Reid, Little Brown
 15. Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, Random House

ON THE RISE:
 23. Underwater Dogs, by Seth Casteel, Little Brown
 Award-winning photographer Casteel presents a playful and energetic testament to the joy that dogs bring into our lives.

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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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