Oprah Winfrey is not only the doyenne of the most successful day-time talk show television show; she is also the moderator of what must be the longest running and largest book club ever. (If, that is, by "book club" you count an audience of millions.) Her effect on the publishing industry has been enormous: Oprah told her viewers to read Dickens, Tolstoy, and other classical writers they fell asleep reading in high school, and legions of fans obediently ran out to buy A Tale of Two Cities and Anna Karenina. She told readers to buy books by authors they'd never heard of, and they bought those, too. Special editions were printed. Movies were made. For an author, being named to Oprah's Book Club was the literary equivalent of winning the lottery.
In the realm of contemporary authors, Oprah's books club choices have helped make millionaires out of here-to-fore unknown mid-list literary writers. But that's not to say her selections were predictable: Just when you thought you could identify a typical Oprah book club selection, she'd throw a curve ball: Best selling author Ken Follet (who hardly needed Oprah to be on the New York Times best-seller list) was on the list, as was Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and southern classicist William Faulkner. She included not one, but three books by Bill Cosby and Toni Morrison. Jonathan Franzen sat down to talk about his writing process, as did Barbara Kingsolver and Maya Angelou.
What was the appeal? Why did the recommendation of a television personality better known for talk show staples have such as impact on the gentlemanly old publishing industry?
One reason might be that the books were reliable. After speaking about one my own books to members of a (much smaller!) book club some years ago, the topic turned to selecting the next month's choices. Oprah's books were mentioned, and a member explained that letting Oprah choose the books was kind of like going to a restaurant and having someone else pick out your dinner menu: Sometimes you'd taste something you'd never have chosen to order, but you'd find your really enjoyed it. Oprah's books may not always be what you thought they were going to be, and they might not be something you'd have picked up on your own. But they were always well written and worth reading.
Oprah's Book Club: The Early Years
Started in 1996, in its early years, Oprah's Book club featured a disproportionate number of books that I have come to call "lit light." These are books with literary elements, but also with enough popular appeal to put them in the "interesting to read and recommend to your friends" category. Some, like Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, were more challenging than others. Most were written by women (not surprisingly, considering Oprah's audience). Consistent with themes dominant in her talk show, many of the books focused on abuse, pedophilia, incest, and poverty. In 1997, Oprah shook up the parade of literary midlist authors and threw in not one but three children's books by long-time friend Bill Cosby.
During its first five years, the book club gave a huge boost to a certain type of publishing, to worthwhile books that otherwise might be ignored. Some were by well-known authors, but many were by newcomers or by writers who had been unable to break the glass ceiling into best-sellerdom. The Oprah seal of approval put these books on the map.
The Later Years of the Oprah Book Club
Not surprisingly, although the Book Club picks were a financial bonanza for authors and publishers, in terms of TV audience, they didn't rate as highly as murder, mayhem, celebrity gossip, infidelity, and other talk show staple topics. In 2001 and 2002, the number of Book Club episodes started shrinking, and regular readers lost their monthly literary fix, as the Book Club was suspended for several months. The balance of writers, changed when the Book Cub resumed, heavily leaning toward classics such as John Steinbeck's East of Eden (meaning, of course, that the authors could not be present for the literary tete-a-tete). In 2004, three our of the four selected authors (Tolstoy, Carson McCullers, and Pearl Buck) were dead. in 2005, there were only four books: three by William Faulkner; the other was the now-discredited memoir, A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey. For whatever reason, the 2006, the only selection was the stark Holocaust memoir, Night, by Elie Wiesel.
For many readers, the book club seemed to have lost its focus. While in the earlier years, readers had a fairly clear idea of what it meant to be a typical "Oprah" book, in the later years, the number of books presented annually dropped and the types of books selected started ranging from nonfiction to memoir to classical fiction to new fiction. Readers no longer had a sense of what they were getting when they picked up an Oprah book. Now, it was like going out to eat, and not only having someone else pick out your meal, but not knowing whether it would be fast food or gourmet French. Perhaps that was interesting. Perhaps Oprah was making the point that books aren't supposed to be predictable; that good ones of all genres reflect the variety of life. But for readers it was confusing.
Between 1996 and 2010, Oprah's book club chose 64 books. Some went on to be best sellers, some already were. Some became movies. Like the Harry Potter series, Oprah's Book Club proved that people will go out to book stores and stand in line to get a book. She showed how books touched lives, and the book club forced the publishing industry to take a new look at their mid-list literary authors (a group that had previously been categorized as "unmarketable"). Indeed, during the heyday of the book club, many mid-list literary authors lived with the dream of two phone calls: One coming from the National Book Awards, and the other coming from Oprah.
With the closing of Oprah's show, the dreams of writers have gotten a little smaller. But perhaps the legacy of her book club: the knowledge that people are willing to spend money buying good books, and time reading them, will live on.
Karen Berger - Karen Berger is the author of 15 books. Please click on her name to read her full bio.
