Bestselling books the week of 5/4/17, according to IndieBound

What's selling best in independent bookstores across America.

1. HARDCOVER FICTION

1. Norse Mythology, by Neil Gaiman, Norton
2. Anything Is Possible, by Elizabeth Strout, Random House
3. The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead, Doubleday
4. The Fix, by David Baldacci, Grand Central
5. A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles, Viking
6. Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders, Random House
7. The Women in the Castle, by Jessica Shattuck, Morrow
8. Beartown, by Fredrik Backman, Atria
9. The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, by Lisa See, Scribner
10. The Stars Are Fire, by Anita Shreve, Knopf
11. The Black Book, by James Patterson, Little Brown
12. Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer, MCD
13. American War, by Omar El Akkad, Knopf
14. Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid, Riverhead
15. Golden Prey, by John Sandford, Putnam

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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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