Bestselling books the week of 5/5/13, according to IndieBound*

What's selling best in independent bookstores across America.

1. HARDCOVER FICTION

1. The Burgess Boys, by Elizabeth Strout, Random House
2. Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson, Reagan Arthur Books
3. Maya's Notebook, by Isabel Allende, Harper
4. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, Crown
5. The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud, Knopf
6. The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer, Riverhead
7. Z, by Therese Anne Fowler, St. Martin's
8. All That Is, by James Salter, Knopf
9. Paris, by Edward Rutherfurd, Doubleday
10. The Hit, by David Baldacci, Grand Central
11. Nos4a2, by Joe Hill, Morrow
12. 12th of Never, by James Patterson, Maxine Paetro, Little Brown
13. Tenth of December, by George Saunders, Random House
14. Best Kept Secret, by Jeffrey Archer, St. Martin's
15. The Dinner, by Herman Koch, Hogarth

*Published Thursday, May 9, 2013 (for the sales week ended Sunday, May 5, 2013). Based on reporting from many hundreds of independent bookstores across the United States. For information on more titles, please visit IndieBound.org

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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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