Information about Oprah's Book Club

Oprah's Book Club is a book club segment of the American talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, highlighting books chosen by host Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey started the book club in 1996 by selecting a new book each month. Because of the book club's wide popularity, many obscure titles have become very popular bestsellers, increasing sales by as many as a million copies at the height of the book club's popularity; this occurrence is known colloquially as the Oprah effect.^[1]

The book club has also been connected to several well known literary controversies such as Jonathan Franzen's public dissatisfaction with his novel The Corrections having been chosen by Winfrey, and the now infamous incident of James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, a 2005 selection, being outed as largely fabricated.

History

The book club's first selection in September of 1996 was the recently published novel The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard. Winfrey's choices averaged one new book a month for the next six years. Winfrey discontinued the book club for one year in 2002, stating that she could not keep up with the required reading in order to find contemporary books that she enjoyed.^[2] After its revival in 2003, books were selected on a more limited basis (three or four a year) and an emphasis was switched to classic works of literature, starting with that summer's selection of East of Eden. Steinbeck's then fifty-one year old novel spent seven weeks at the top of the New York Times list of paperback best sellers.^[1] In September of 2005, Winfrey announced she would be opening the book club up to a wide range of titles and genres, including non-fiction and memoir.

Winfrey returned to fiction with her 2007 selections of The Road by Cormac McCarthy in March and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides in June. Shortly after its being chosen, The Road was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Winfrey conducted the first ever television interview with McCarthy, a famously reclusive author, on June 5, 2007.

On October 5, 2007 the latest selection was announced as Love in the Time of Cholera, a 1985 novel by Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel García Márquez. Another work by Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was a previous selection for the book club in 2004.^[3]

Influence

In Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America, Kathleen Rooney describes Winfrey as "a serious American intellectual who pioneered the use of electronic media, specifically television and the Internet, to take reading – a decidedly non-technological and highly individual act – and highlight its social elements and uses in such a way to motivate millions of erstwhile non-readers to pick up books."

Business Week stated:

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the Oprah phenomenon is how outsized her power is compared with that of other market movers. Some observers suggest that Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's The Daily Show could be No. 2. Other proven arm-twisters include Fox News's Sean Hannity, National Public Radio's Terry Gross, radio personality Don Imus, and CBS' 60 Minutes. But no one comes close to Oprah's clout: Publishers estimate that her power to sell a book is anywhere from 20 to 100 times that of any other media personality.^[4]

Controversies

Many literature critics have criticized Winfrey's book selections as overly sentimental. The most notable of these criticisms came from Jonathan Franzen, whose book The Corrections was selected in 2001. After the announcement was made, he expressed distaste with being in the company of other Oprah's Book Club authors, saying in an interview that Winfrey had "picked some good books, but she's picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe, myself, even though I think she's really smart and she's really fighting the good fight."^[5] Oprah suspended the club for a year shortly after Franzen's criticism.^[2]

In late 2005 and early 2006, Oprah's Book Club was again in the news. Winfrey selected James Frey's A Million Little Pieces for the September 2005 selection. Pieces is a book billed as a memoir – a true account of Frey's life as an alcoholic, drug addict and criminal. But critics soon questioned the validity of Frey's supposedly true account, especially regarding his treatment while in a rehabilitation facility and his stories of time spent in jail. Initially, Frey convinced Larry King that the embellishments in his book were part of any literary memoir and Winfrey encouraged debate about how creative non-fiction should be classified, and cited the inspirational impact Frey's work has had on so many of her viewers. But as more accusations against the book continued to surface, Winfrey invited Frey on the show, to find out directly from him whether he had lied to her and her viewers. During a heated live televised debate, Winfrey forced Frey to admit that he had indeed lied about spending time in jail, and that he had no idea whether he had two root canals or not, despite devoting several pages to describing them. Winfrey then brought out Frey's publisher Nan Talese to defend her decision to classify the book as a memoir, and forced Telese to admit that she had done nothing to check the book's veracity, despite the fact that her representatives had assured Winfrey's staff that the book was indeed non-fiction and described it as "brutally honest" in a press release.

The media feasted over the televised showdown. David Carr of the New York Times wrote: "Both Mr. Frey and Ms. Talese were snapped in two like dry winter twigs."^[6] New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd praised the show, saying, "It was a huge relief, after our long national slide into untruth and no consequences, into Swift boating and swift bucks, into W.'s delusion and denial, to see the Empress of Empathy icily hold someone accountable for lying,"^[7] and the Washington Post's Richard Cohen was so impressed by the confrontation that he crowned Winfrey "Mensch of the Year."^[8]

Oprah's Book Club Selections

Date	Title	Author
1996
September	The Deep End of the Ocean	Jacquelyn Mitchard
October	Song of Solomon	Toni Morrison
November	The Book of Ruth	Jane Hamilton
December	She's Come Undone	Wally Lamb
1997
February	Stones from the River	Ursula Hegi
April	The Rapture of Canaan	Sheri Reynolds
May	The Heart of a Woman	Maya Angelou
June	Songs In Ordinary Time	Mary McGarry Morris
September	The Meanest Thing To Say	Bill Cosby
September	A Lesson Before Dying	Ernest J. Gaines
October	A Virtuous Woman	Kaye Gibbons
October	Ellen Foster	Kaye Gibbons
December	The Treasure Hunt	Bill Cosby
December	The Best Way to Play	Bill Cosby
1998
January	Paradise	Toni Morrison
March	Here on Earth	Alice Hoffman
April	Black and Blue	Anna Quindlen
May	Breath, Eyes, Memory	Edwidge Danticat
September	What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day	Pearl Cleage
October	Midwives	Chris Bohjalian
December	Where the Heart Is	Billie Letts
1999
January	Jewel	Bret Lott
February	The Reader	Bernhard Schlink
March	The Pilot's Wife	Anita Shreve
April	I Know This Much Is True	Wally Lamb
May	White Oleander	Janet Fitch
June	Mother of Pearl	Melinda Haynes
September	Tara Road	Maeve Binchy
October	The Poisonwood Bible	Barbara Kingsolver
November	Vinegar Hill	A. Manette Ansay
December	A Map of the World	Jane Hamilton
2000
January	Gap Creek	Robert Morgan
February	Daughter of Fortune	Isabel Allende
March	Back Roads	Tawni O'Dell
April	The Bluest Eye	Toni Morrison
May	While I Was Gone	Sue Miller
June	River, Cross My Heart	Breena Clarke
August	Open House	Elizabeth Berg
September	Drowning Ruth	Christina Schwarz
November	House of Sand and Fog	Andre Dubus III
2001
January	We Were the Mulvaneys	Joyce Carol Oates
March	Icy Sparks	Gwyn Hyman Rubio
May		Malika Oufkir
June	Cane River	Lalita Tademy
September	The Corrections	Jonathan Franzen
November	A Fine Balance	Rohinton Mistry
2002
January	Fall on Your Knees	Ann-Marie MacDonald
April	Sula	Toni Morrison
2003
June	East of Eden	John Steinbeck
September	Cry, The Beloved Country	Alan Paton
2004
January	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel García Márquez
April	The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter	Carson McCullers
May	Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy
September	The Good Earth	Pearl S. Buck
2005
June	The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August	William Faulkner
September	A Million Little Pieces	James Frey
2006
January	Night	Elie Wiesel
2007
January		Sidney Poitier
March	The Road	Cormac McCarthy
June	Middlesex	Jeffrey Eugenides
October	Love in the Time of Cholera	Gabriel García Márquez

References

Footnotes

Further reading

• Illouz, Eva (2003). Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-11813-9. 
• Rooney, Kathleen (2005). Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 1-55728-782-1. 

External links

• Oprah's Book Club
• Oprah Book Club Archive