Bestselling books the week of 01/30/14, according to IndieBound*

What's selling best at independent bookstores across America.

1. HARDCOVER FICTION

1. The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, Little Brown
2. The Invention of Wings, by Sue Monk Kidd, Viking
3. The Days of Anna Madrigal, by Armistead Maupin, Harper
4. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, Crown
5. Dog Songs, by Mary Oliver, Penguin Press
6. The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton, Little Brown
7. Under the Wide and Starry Sky, by Nancy Horan, Ballantine
8. The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches, by Alan Bradley, Delacorte
9. The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert, Viking
10. Sycamore Row, by John Grisham, Doubleday
11. The First Phone Call From Heaven, by Mitch Albom, Harper
12. The Circle, by Dave Eggers, Knopf
13. The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri, Knopf
14. Radiance of Tomorrow, by Ishmael Beah, Sarah Crichton Books
15. The Husband's Secret, by Liane Moriarty, Amy Einhorn Books

On the Rise:
19. Saints of the Shadow Bible, by Ian Rankin, Little Brown
A new Inspector Rebus thriller by the bestselling author of Standing in Another Man's Grave.

*Published Thursday, January 30, 2014 (for the sales week ended Sunday, January 26, 2014). 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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