Bestselling books the week of 2/10/13, according to IndieBound*

What's selling best at bookstores across America?

3. TRADE PAPERBACK FICTION

1. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, Ballantine
2. Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James, Vintage
3. Canada by Richard Ford, Ecco Press
4. The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, Ballantine
5. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, Picador
6. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, Vintage
7. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, Anchor
8. Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Mariner
9. Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, Vintage
10. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, Harper Perennial
11. Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, Penguin
12. The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, Reagan Arthur/Back Bay Books
13. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, MTV Books
14. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Random House
15. The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner

On the Rise:
18. In One Person by John Irving, S&S
Irving's intimate and unforgettable new novel about the life of a bisexual man.

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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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