In Defense of Oprah's Book Club

Note: a list of sources and further reading appears at the end of this post.

Oprah is a lot of things – brand, businesswoman, talk show host, cultural tastemaker. When she picks a book for her book club, it literally flies off the shelves. I’ve witnessed the phenomenon first hand. I worked at a large chain bookstore in high school, right around the time when He’s Just Not That Into you was just a book and not a ridiculously star-studded movie. One mention of this slim self-help volume on her show and the book sold out in, I kid you not, two days. This frenzy for a lightweight self-help book based on a catchphrase from Sex and the City lasted for roughly two weeks; I can't count the number of people who came in and said, "I saw this book on Oprah..."

Of course, He’s Just Not That Into You was only mentioned on the show in passing; the effect is hugely heightened when it’s her official book club. Generally Oprah only picks fiction for her book club, and this fiction goes on to break records, storm the bestseller lists, and essentially become the “it” book of the month or year. And they say people don’t read anymore. Clearly, if Oprah’s reading it, so is everyone else.

People scorn this phenomenon. Jonathan Franzen actually turned down the honour, claiming that his novel was a "hard book for that audience." This smacks of elitism and an alarmingly outdated attitude about the class of people who watch Oprah, but you know what else is obvious here? Sexism. Franzen (and everyone else) knows that Oprah’s audience is mostly women. So when he says he doesn’t want that audience reading his novel, what he really means is that he doesn’t want women to read his work - particularly the type of women he (and we all) assume watches Oprah: stay-at-home moms. I guess only men’s brains are big enough to understand all those complex words.

Well, congratulations, Franzen, you got your wish. After an outburst like that I’ve been convinced to avoid your writing at all costs. My lady-brain doesn’t like to be challenged.

Readers, particularly more academic or egotistical ones, aren’t necessarily fans of the Oprah Effect either. Say there’s a little-known but brilliant novel that you love and discovered a long time ago. Oprah picks it and suddenly your cousin who used to read nothing but magazines and romance novels is raving about the author’s narrative style. As an English student, I totally get that – within reason. It can be frustrating to hear people talking about novels I spend so much time analyzing and dissecting at a high level.

But I would like to extend an invitation to all of those elitist readers who think that Oprah’s Book Club is about showcasing chick lit, or those who think that Oprah should leave literature alone because she can’t understand it properly. Here we go: get over yourselves. What does Oprah really do with her book club? Well, before she started picking only classic novels in response to Franzen’s idiocy, she increased sales for a lot of people who would otherwise be struggling writers. And because she picked a lot of female authors, she was basically helping said authors find a much bigger audience – and paycheck – than they might have on their own, since fiction by women is increasingly marginalized or missing from the pages of "prestigious" (brand-name) reviews like The NYT Book Review.

That’s probably another reason people hate on Oprah’s Book Club: she likes female authors. I think that’s a great way to counteract the pages of, say, the NYTBR, and every other traditional book review out there, which are dominated by men. But some people look at the list of Oprah-approved authors and think, “Oh. Girls. These books must suck.”

But you know what? Oprah has good taste! I guess it’s shocking to some conservatives, or those pretentious literary types (we all know some), that a black woman who was born into poverty likes to read and share what she reads with others. Let’s take a look at some of Oprah’s past picks, shall we? Among others, we have The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Anna Karenina, White Oleander, The Reader, The Poisonwood Bible, and more. She’s picked novels by Cormac McCarthy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison (more than once).

So not only has Oprah given much-needed exposure to a lot of novels that were formerly unheard of (The Reader, according to Wikipedia, was made into a movie thanks to the Oprah Effect), she encourages her audience to seek out challenging, classic literature. I remember catching an episode where she discussed Anna Karenina. “Hang on!” she said to her audience, holding up her paperback copy. “We’re almost there!”

That kind of encouraging attitude attracts people to reading classic literature. I can see why it scares authors like Franzen deeply – more people reading your novel means more people who can critique your novel. And since Oprah’s audience is predominantly women, maybe they’ll bring a completely new perspective that authors like Franzen didn't even think to acknowledge, being white men benefiting from all kinds of patriarchal privilege.

Oprah’s Book Club moves books out of stores and into people’s homes. It gives the millions of people who watch Oprah every day a shared experience. It makes daytime television a place for serious literary discussion. The only people who can hate on that are people who are too out-of-touch to realize that reading is for everyone.

Further reading:

Too Cool for Oprah [MobyLives]

What Would Nabokov Do? [Media Bistro]

Oprah's Book Club Website [Oprah.com]

Reading Oprah: How Oprah's Book Club Changed the Way America Reads [SUNY Press summary]