Bestselling books the week of 2/3/13, according to IndieBound*

What's selling best at bookstores across America?

1. HARDCOVER FICTION

1. Tenth of December by George Saunders, Random House
2. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, Crown
3. Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver, Harper

4. The Round House by Louise Erdrich, Harper

5. A Memory of Light by Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson, Tor
6. Speaking From Among the Bones by Alan Bradley, Delacorte
7. The River Swimmer by Jim Harrison, Grove Press
8. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis, Knopf
9. The Aviator's Wife by Melanie Benjamin, Delacorte
10. This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz, Riverhead
11. Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan, Nan A. Talese
12. Insane City by Dave Barry, Putnam Adult
13. Suspect by Robert Crais, Putnam Adult
14. The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier, Dutton
15. A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver, Penguin Press

On the Rise:
21. Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker by Jennifer Chiaverini, Dutton
In her new novel, Chiaverini illuminates the extraordinary friendship between Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, a former slave.

*Published Thursday, February 7, 2013 (for the sales week ended Sunday, February 3, 2013). Based on reporting from many hundreds of independent bookstores across the United States. For information on more titles, please visit

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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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