Oprah's Book Club
Oprah's Book Club was a book discussion 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, selecting a new book, usually a novel, for viewers to read and discuss each month. In total the club recommended 70 books during its 15 years.
Due to the book club's widespread popularity, many obscure titles have become very popular bestsellers, increasing sales in some cases by as many as several million copies. Al Greco, a Fordham University marketing professor, estimated the total sales of the 70 "Oprah editions" at over 55 million copies.
The club has seen several 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 almost entirety fabricated. The latter controversy resulted in Frey and publisher Nan Talese being confronted and publicly shamed by Winfrey in a highly praised live televised episode of Winfrey's show.
On Friday, June 1, 2012, Oprah announced the launch of Oprah's Book Club 2.0 with by Cheryl Strayed. The new version of Oprah's Book Club, a joint project between and O, The Oprah Magazine, will incorporate the use of various social media platforms and e-readers.
On March 25, 2019, Apple Inc. and Oprah announced a revival of Oprah's Book Club that will air on Apple TV+.
History
The book club's first selection on September 17, 1996, was the then recently published novel The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard. Winfrey discontinued the book club for one year in 2002, stating that she could not keep up with the required reading while still searching for contemporary novels that she enjoyed. After its revival in 2003, books were selected on a more limited basis.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.
The October 2007 selection was Love in the Time of Cholera, a 1985 novel by Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel García Márquez, greatly furthering not only the influence of the author in North America, but that of his translator Edith Grossman. Another work by Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was a previous selection for the book club in 2004.
The last club selection was a special edition of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. It had disappointingly low sales figures.
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.
In 2009 it was reported that the influence of Winfrey's book club had even spread to Brazil with picks like A New Earth dominating Brazil's best-seller list.
The club generated so much success for some books that they went on to be adapted into films. This subset includes The Deep End of the Ocean and The Reader.
At the show's conclusion in May 2011, Nielsen BookScan created a list of the top-10 bestsellers from the club's final 10 years. The top four with sales figures as of May 2011:
- Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, 3,370,000 copies
- James Frey, A Million Little Pieces, 2,695,500 copies
- Elie Wiesel, Night, 2,021,000 copies
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 1,385,000 copies
Critical reception
The club has received critical commentaries from the literary community.Scott Stossel, an editor at The Atlantic, wrote:
Controversies
Jonathan Franzen
felt conflicted about his book The Corrections being chosen as a book club selection. 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." Franzen added that his novel was a "hard book for that audience." Franzen also felt conflicted about being selected by Winfrey because he was hoping to attract a male audience.Following the criticism Franzen was uninvited from the televised book club dinner, and he apologized profusely. When Franzen was not invited back, he suggested that perhaps he and Winfrey could still have dinner but not on TV, but Winfrey was all booked up, and her spokesperson said she was moving on.
Other writers were critical of Franzen. Writing in the New York Times, author Verlyn Klinkenborg suggested that "lurking behind Mr. Franzen's rejection of Ms. Winfrey is an elemental distrust of readers, except for the ones he designates." Andre Dubus III wrote that, "It is so elitist it offends me deeply. The assumption that high art is not for the masses, that they won't understand it and they don't deserve it – I find that reprehensible. Is that a judgment on the audience? Or on the books in whose company he would be?" Editor Dennis Loy Johnson questioned Franzen's motivations, asking, "Is it misogyny, do you think, or class prejudice, or worse?"
In 2010, Oprah chose another of Franzen's books, Freedom, for her book club. She says that after she read a copy of the book Franzen had sent her with a note, she called the author and gained his permission. Oprah said "we have a little history this author and I", but called the book "a masterpiece", and according to an article in the Los Angeles Times, she "seems to have forgiven the bestselling author after their 2001 kerfuffle".
James Frey
In late 2005 and early 2006, Oprah's Book Club was again embroiled in controversy. 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. It became the Book Club's greatest selling book up to that point, and many readers spoke of how the account helped free them from drugs as well. But the additional attention focused on Frey's memoir soon led to critics questioning 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 of a sort that could be found in any literary memoir; Winfrey encouraged debate about how creative non-fiction should be classified, and cited the inspirational impact Frey's work had had on so many of her viewers. But as more accusations against the book surfaced, 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 without painkillers or not, despite devoting several pages to describing them in excruciating detail. Winfrey then brought out Frey's publisher Nan Talese to defend her decision to classify the book as a memoir, and forced Talese 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." "Oprah annihilates Frey," proclaimed Larry King. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, "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," and the Washington Post's Richard Cohen was so impressed by the confrontation that he crowned Winfrey "Mensch of the Year."
Oprah's Book Club selections
Source:See also Oprah's Book Club 2.0
| Date | Title | Author | Reference |
| September 1996 | The Deep End of the Ocean | Jacquelyn Mitchard | |
| October 1996 | Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison | |
| November 1996 | The Book of Ruth | Jane Hamilton | |
| December 1996 | She's Come Undone | Wally Lamb | |
| February 1997 | Stones from the River | Ursula Hegi | |
| April 1997 | The Rapture of Canaan | Sheri Reynolds | |
| May 1997 | The Heart of a Woman | Maya Angelou | |
| June 1997 | Songs In Ordinary Time | Mary McGarry Morris | |
| September 1997 | The Meanest Thing To Say | Bill Cosby | |
| September 1997 | A Lesson Before Dying | Ernest J. Gaines | |
| October 1997 | A Virtuous Woman | Kaye Gibbons | |
| October 1997 | Ellen Foster | Kaye Gibbons | |
| December 1997 | The Treasure Hunt | Bill Cosby | |
| December 1997 | The Best Way to Play | Bill Cosby | |
| January 1998 | Paradise | Toni Morrison | |
| March 1998 | Here on Earth | Alice Hoffman | |
| April 1998 | Black and Blue | Anna Quindlen | |
| May 1998 | Breath, Eyes, Memory | Edwidge Danticat | |
| June 1998 | I Know This Much Is True | Wally Lamb | |
| September 1998 | What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day | Pearl Cleage | |
| October 1998 | Midwives | Chris Bohjalian | |
| December 1998 | Where the Heart Is | Billie Letts | |
| January 1999 | Jewel | Bret Lott | |
| February 1999 | The Reader | Bernhard Schlink | |
| March 1999 | The Pilot's Wife | Anita Shreve | |
| May 1999 | White Oleander | Janet Fitch | |
| June 1999 | Mother of Pearl | Melinda Haynes | |
| September 1999 | Tara Road | Maeve Binchy | |
| October 1999 | River, Cross My Heart | Breena Clarke | |
| November 1999 | Vinegar Hill | A. Manette Ansay | |
| December 1999 | A Map of the World | Jane Hamilton | |
| January 2000 | Gap Creek | Robert Morgan | |
| February 2000 | Daughter of Fortune | Isabel Allende | |
| March 2000 | Back Roads | Tawni O'Dell | |
| April 2000 | The Bluest Eye | Toni Morrison | |
| May 2000 | While I Was Gone | Sue Miller | |
| June 2000 | The Poisonwood Bible | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| August 2000 | Open House | Elizabeth Berg | |
| September 2000 | Drowning Ruth | Christina Schwarz | |
| November 2000 | House of Sand and Fog | Andre Dubus III | |
| January 2001 | We Were the Mulvaneys | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| March 2001 | Icy Sparks | Gwyn Hyman Rubio | |
| May 2001 | ' | Malika Oufkir | |
| June 2001 | Cane River | Lalita Tademy | |
| September 2001 | The Corrections | Jonathan Franzen | |
| November 2001 | A Fine Balance | Rohinton Mistry | |
| January 2002 | Fall on Your Knees | Ann-Marie MacDonald | |
| April 2002 | Sula | Toni Morrison | |
| June 2003 | East of Eden | John Steinbeck | |
| September 2003 | Cry, The Beloved Country | Alan Paton | |
| January 2004 | One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel García Márquez | |
| April 2004 | The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter | Carson McCullers | |
| May 2004 | Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | |
| September 2004 | The Good Earth | Pearl S. Buck | |
| June 2005 | The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August | William Faulkner | |
| September 2005 | A Million Little Pieces | James Frey | |
| January 2006 | Night | Elie Wiesel | |
| January 2007 | ' | Sir Sidney Poitier | |
| March 2007 | The Road | Cormac McCarthy | |
| June 2007 | Middlesex | Jeffrey Eugenides | |
| October 2007 | Love in the Time of Cholera | Gabriel García Márquez | |
| November 2007 | The Pillars of the Earth | Ken Follett | |
| January 2008 | A New Earth | Eckhart Tolle | |
| September 2008 | The Story of Edgar Sawtelle | David Wroblewski | |
| September 2009 | Say You're One of Them | Uwem Akpan | |
| September 2010 | Freedom | Jonathan Franzen | |
| December 2010 | Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities | Charles Dickens |
The original book club ended with the conclusion of The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2011. See Oprah's Book Club 2.0 for the selections of the club's 2012 relaunch.