Inside Track- 12 Good Books

They're stacked high on my nightstand, waiting to be read: backlist books, frontlist titles, new galleys, old classics. Oprah Winfrey, as you've all heard, can't find any books to inspire her with the desire to read and to share what she's read with her viewers. In the damning statement she released last month as she dropped her show's book club, she said, "It has become harder and harder to find books on a monthly basis that I feel absolutely compelled to share."

When Winfrey was honored at the National Book Awards several years ago for the impetus she and her book club had given books and reading—not to mention publishers' sales and library circulation statistics—she emphasized the impact of reading on her life and the importance of books for all. Now, she can't find even a dozen books to keep her book club going.

It's certainly Winfrey's prerogative to end the book club. But her choice of words rankles. Notwithstanding the soul-searching that goes on on her show and in her magazine, Winfrey isn't given much to soul-searching in her press statements regarding books. She disinvited Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections) from her show with another blunt, pithy statement. In that instance her coolness may have been justified. In this case, her words are profoundly thoughtless.

To give her credit, Winfrey jumped on the book group phenomenon and popularized it as only she and her show could. Certainly, libraries had hosted book groups long before Winfrey launched her club in fall 1996. Nevertheless, she brought some new authors into the mainstream culture and resurrected some backlist titles. By enticing hundreds of thousands of viewers to read the same book at the same time, her club may have been, in a sense, the precursor of the One City, One Book concept.

Her impact on libraries was not insignificant either, though some librarians may rue the number of holds her books generated. She brought new patrons into libraries who had never been there before. With pressure from the American Library Association (ALA), distributors, and the library media, Winfrey's producers agreed to give libraries and library distributors the same advance warning about her picks that booksellers got. Moreover, Winfrey requested that the publisher of each book club selection donate 10,000 books to libraries; many of these books went to institutional members of ALA.

Ingram established a standing order plan for her books and shipped titles automatically and in advance to their library customers so they could have them on their shelves when booksellers did. Long before the Harry Potter mania had librarians shelving books at midnight before publication day, Winfrey forced librarians to think about ordering many more copies and getting them into libraries and out to patrons much faster.

Happily, despite the demise of Winfrey's book club, there is no sign that book groups are on the wane. Nancy Pearl, LJ's Reader's Shelf columnist, director of the Washington Center for the Book, and founder of One City, One Book, notes, "Book groups aren't at all a passing fad. More and more people are finding how much there is to be gotten from well-run book groups." (For this issue's installment of Reader's Shelf, which focuses on book group titles from the immigrant experience, see p. 152.) Three new national clubs have been launched via the Today show, USA Today, and Regis and Kelly.

There is some irony in Winfrey's selection of Toni Morrison's Sula as her final book club choice. True, Morrison is one of her favorite authors, having been chosen four times altogether. But Morrison, in her writings and in the brilliant speech she gave when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, attests to the power of language "as an agency…an act with consequences…the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction." Would that Oprah Winfrey had thought more about her favorite writer's words before she issued her own.