A few posts ago, I briefly wondered why there's such a stigma attached to Oprah books. At the book review panel, an academic in the audience stated that she gets some of her fiction recommendations from "god forbid" Oprah. The qualifier struck me as odd. She was clearly embarrassed by her admission and must have added the "god forbid" as a means of staving off not being taken seriously.
Years ago, when I lived in Chicago, I attended an Oprah taping after she had lost a ton of weight on a liquid diet. She moved around the audience with a microphone back then, and I was awestruck by how large her head and hair were compared to her tiny, tiny body. Seriously, the ratio was something along the lines of a Charms Blow Pop, and I was so preoccupied with wondering how she managed to carry her cranium that I barely remember what the show was about. Soap stars maybe.
Oprah's Book Club doesn't register much on my radar, probably because I don't fall into the demographic. In looking over the master list of selections, I have to admit that I haven't read many of them. As a result, I don't feel qualified to judge her selections as worthy of either praise or scorn. Of the books I have read, though, I enjoyed every one:
- Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
- The Best Way to Play
by Bill Cosby
[Note: I used to teach 3rd and 4th grade and have read a lot of children's books.]
- The Treasure Hunt
by Bill Cosby
- The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
[Note: BookBlog's September 2002 selection.]
- East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
- The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
- Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
[Note: BookBlog's February 2004 selection.]
My favorite above is Middlesex, but I absolutely loved The Virgin Suicides
Via the comments, Imani of The Books of My Numberless Dreams writes that her ideas about literature are at the opposite end of the spectrum from Oprah's:
"To Winfrey, though, an author's literary style, erudition or linguistic experimentation is of secondary importance: She's primarily concerned with the social aspects of literature, how literature can help our culture. If the work doesn't have a useful moral foundation that has the potential to make the world a more civil and pleasant place, it's not going to be one of her selections." - from the Los Angeles Times via Black Garterbelt
Matt of A Variety of Words adds:
I'll also throw out why for me there is a stigma attached to reading an Oprah book. I feel like she is trying to be our savior, telling us what to think and what is good because we can't possibly decide those things ourself. I can make my own decisions on what is good thank you very much.
Hmm...it seems as though Oprah's desire to better society is off-putting. I can't help making a connection to this month's discussion selection, Happiness
This is a book about the end of the world, and as such, it involves diet cookbooks, self-help gurus, sewer-crawling convicts, overworked editors, the economic collapse of the United States of America and the widespread tilling of alfalfa fields. And I think one of the characters loses a finger at some point, too. This is the story of apocalypse: Apocalypse Nice. It tells of a devastating plague of human happiness, an epidemic of warm fuzzy hugs, and a mysterious trailer on the edge of a desert...
So I have to wonder, at what point does making the world a better place go from sincere altruism to mass consumption of tainted Kool-Aid followed by the apocalypse?
