Bestselling books the week of 2/21/13, according to IndieBound*

What's selling best at bookstores across America.

1. HARDCOVER FICTION

1. Tenth of December, by George Saunders, Random House
2. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, Crown
3. Vampires in the Lemon Grove, by Karen Russell, Knopf
4. Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver, Harper
5. A Week in Winter, by Maeve Binchy, Knopf
6. My Brother's Book, by Maurice Sendak, Harper
7. The Round House, by Louise Erdrich, Harper
8. A Memory of Light, by Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson, Tor
9. The Dinner, by Herman Koch, Hogarth
10. Insane City, by Dave Barry, Putnam Adult
11. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, by Ayana Mathis, Knopf
12. The Aviator's Wife, by Melanie Benjamin, Delacorte
13. Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan, Nan A. Talese
14. This Is How You Lose Her, by Junot Díaz, Riverhead
15. Ghostman, by Roger Hobbs, Knopf

*Published Thursday, February 21, 2013 (for the sales week ended Sunday, February 17, 2013). 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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