Bestselling books the week of 3/15/12, according to IndieBound*

What's selling best in independent bookstores across America.

2. HARDCOVER NONFICTION

1. Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo, Random House
 2. Quiet, by Susan Cain, Crown
 3. Bringing Up Bébé, by Pamela Druckerman, Penguin Press
 4. Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, S&S
 5. Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, by Elaine Pagels, Viking
 6. The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg, Random House
 7. Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, Random House
 8. American Sniper, by Chris Kyle, et al., Morrow
 9. The End of Illness, by David B. Agus, M.D., Free Press
 10. Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, FSG
 11. House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East, by Anthony Shadid, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
 12. Killing Lincoln, by Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard, Holt
 13. Goodnight iPad, by Ann Droyd, Blue Rider
 14. Go the F**k to Sleep, by Adam Mansbach, Ricardo Cortes (Illus.), Akashic
 15. In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson, Crown

ON THE RISE:
 17. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, by Jeanette Winterson, Grove Press
 Winterson's memoir of her search for belonging, love, and identity is a March 2012 Indie Next List Great Read.

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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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