Bestselling books the week of 11/29/12, according to IndieBound*

What's selling best at independent bookstores across America.

2. HARDCOVER NONFICTION

1. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, by Jon Meacham, Random House
2. Help, Thanks, Wow, by Anne Lamott, Riverhead
3. I Could Pee on This, by Francesco Marciuliano, Chronicle
4. Barefoot Contessa Foolproof, by Ina Garten, Clarkson Potter
5. Killing Kennedy, by Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard, Holt
6. America Again, by Stephen Colbert, Grand Central
7. Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, Knopf
8. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, by William Manchester, Paul Reid, Little Brown
9. Hallucinations, by Oliver Sacks, Knopf
10. The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver, Penguin Press
11. The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, by Deb Perelman, Knopf
12. The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, by David Nasaw, Penguin Press
13. Killing Lincoln, by Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard, Holt
14. No Easy Day, by Mark Owen, Dutton
15. Waging Heavy Peace, by Neil Young, Blue Rider

ON THE RISE:
21. Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die, by Willie Nelson, Morrow
Willie Nelson muses about his greatest influences and the things that are most important to him.

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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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