There were a number of newcomers to this week's national Indie Bestseller List, including three in the top four slots on the Hardcover Fiction category. As it turns out, I've already written about those three fiction titles over the past two weeks - guess other folks thought they were good as well.
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell debuted at #1,
Personal by Lee Child was #2, and Tana French's
The Secret Place hit #4 (behind Haruki Murakami's
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage).
This is fair
ly unusual, but the Indie Hardcover Nonfiction side also featured two new books debuting in the top two slots. Number two is
What I Know for Sure by Oprah Winfrey, a selection of motivating, life-lesson columns she's written over 14 years for
O, The Oprah Magazine. If you know someone who is an Oprah fan, this is a nicely packaged volume that would make a good gift for that person.
And now for something completely different, here's Number One.
What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by
Randall Munroe. From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic
xkcd, this is a collection of hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask - although some people do. Munroe's gift is in taking the wackiest (sometimes dumbest) science-related questions and answering them clearly, scientifically, and with great humor. Here's one
excerpt from his website to give you the idea:
Could you get drunk from drinking a drunk person's blood?
You would have to drink a lot of blood.
A person contains about 5 liters of blood, or 14 glasses.
If your blood is more than about half a percent alcohol, you stand a pretty good chance of dying. There have been a handful of cases of people surviving with a blood alcohol level of above 1%, but the LD50 - the level at which 50% of people will die - is 0.40 (0.4%).
If someone had a BAC of 0.40, and you drank all 14 glasses of their blood in a short amount of time, you would throw up.
You wouldn't throw up because because of the alcohol; you'd just throw up because you're drinking blood.
As with Oprah, this may not be everyone's fare, and Munroe acknowledges as much on his site with this caution about one of the website's staples, his comic drawings - Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).
to "genre" status, it is front and center on bookstore New Release tables and has clearly resonated with a wide cross-section of booksellers. 
s a fascinating new novel about the birth of printing in medieval Germany. Watch this short video of Christie describing her work and see what you think.