Bestselling books the week of 11/20/14, according to IndieBound*

What's selling best at independent bookstores across America.

3. TRADE PAPERBACK FICTION

1. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, Broadway
2. Orphan Train, by Christina Baker Kline, Morrow
3. The Martian, by Andy Weir, Broadway
4. Still Life With Bread Crumbs, by Anna Quindlen, Random House
5. The Best American Short Stories 2014, by Jennifer Egan, Heidi Pitlor (Eds.), Mariner
6. The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton, Back Bay
7. The Museum of Extraordinary Things, by Alice Hoffman, Scribner
8. Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Anchor
9. The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion, S&S
10. The First Phone Call From Heaven, by Mitch Albom, Harper
11. Someone, by Alice McDermott, Picador USA
12. Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout, Random House
13. This Is Where I Leave You, by Jonathan Tropper, Plume
14. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman, Morrow
15. Sycamore Row, by John Grisham, Bantam

On the Rise:
21. An Officer and a Spy, by Robert Harris, Vintage
A brilliant novel about the infamous Dreyfus affair, by the bestselling author of Fatherland.

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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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