University of Arkansas Press Listings

Reading with Oprah
The Book Club that Changed America

Kathleen Rooney

The first in-depth look at the phenomenon that is OBC

Adored by its fans, deplored by its critics, the Oprah Book Club has been at the center of arguments about cultural authority and literary taste since its inception in 1996. Virtually everyone seems to have an opinion about this monumental institution with its revolutionary and controversial fusion of the literary, the televisual, and the commercial. Reading with Oprah by Kathleen Rooney is the first in-depth look at the phenomenon that is the OBC.

Rooney combines extensive research with a lively personal voice and engaging narrative style to untangle the myths and presuppositions surrounding the club, to reveal its complex and far-reaching cultural influence, confronting head-on how the club became a crucible for the heated clash between “high” and “low” literary taste. Comprehensive and up-to-date, the book features a wide survey of recent commentary, and describes why the club closed in 2002, as well as why it resumed almost a year later in 2003, with a new focus on “great books.” Rooney also provides the most extensive analysis yet of the Oprah Winfrey–Jonathan Franzen contretemps.

Through her close examination of each of the club’s selected novels, as well as personal interviews and correspondence with OBC authors, Rooney demonstrates that in its tumultuous eight-year history the OBC has occupied a place of prominence unique in the culture that neither its supporters nor detractors have previously given it credit for.

“Rooney takes a steady, smart look at a situation that is both fascinating in its own right and deeply revealing about ‘how it is’ in our cultural life these days.”

—Sven Birkerts, author of
The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

“In her lively, information-filled account of the club’s history, Rooney . . . defends Oprah as a genuine ‘intellectual force.’ . . . Accurately captures the cultural unrest surrounding the Oprah Book Club and raises numerous thoughtful points about its significance.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Rooney’s analysis of the Oprah Book Club is both incisive and sympathetic, both scholarly in its methodology and accessible in its presentation. Anyone interested in the multiple diversities which characterize twenty-first century American culture will find Reading with Oprah provocative and entertaining.”

—Tara Ghoshal Wallace, author of Jane Austen and Narrative Authority

“My publisher said ‘Well, at least if there’s never a second Oprah Winfrey book, you’ll always have been the first.’ Because no one had any idea of the impact it would have, of the hunger and thirst that people had for gossiping about books—which is of course what books are for: gossiping about. And some of the people who read Deep End of the Ocean hadn’t read a book since high school . . . they were blown away by the idea that a so-called serious book could be as much fun to read as a mystery or a romance. . . . By nine o’clock on the first night after the announcement there were four thousand holds on the book at the New York Public Library.”

“I believe Oprah’s Book Club is probably one of the best possible uses of a television set, and my experiences with it were universally positive.”

“My sense is that when we presume that popular books cannot be good or that good books cannot be popular, we: 1) needlessly denigrate some complex fiction simply because it sells; 2) fail to support solid literary work, assuming that mainstream America will find it too challenging. The reality, as Cold Mountain and White Teeth and Plainsong have shown, is that good books CAN be popular if we give ‘middle-brow America’ a chance.”

“The main objection that they [book club detractors] have simply has to do with the sense that one person’s taste has become so enormously influential. . . . I don’t think of myself as an Oprah author, but I’m grateful that I was chosen for one of my books—grateful because I reached a group of readers I surely wouldn’t have otherwise.”

“I’ve spent the majority of my adult life in the high school classroom, attempting to ignite a love of reading in my students which might serve them for the rest of the lives. These days when I tour the country in support of my novels, I see, over and over, the value of Oprah’s Book Club in the numbers of young people who show up for readings. . . . As an avid life-long reader and a powerful and positive role model, Oprah Winfrey has gotten people of all ages to read, to read more, and to read widely. And if the intelligentsia sticks their collective noses in the air and bemoans the fact that the show hasn’t chosen Gravity’s Rainbow or Ulysses for discussion, well, so be it. . . . The Oprah Book Club is the medium. The novel itself is the message and must stand or fall on its own merits.”

“The Oprah Book Club makes people read and that, I think, is a great thing. It is so great that I don’t care too much about the criticism that I sometimes hear smart people raise in a smart way.”

“I’m particularly disdainful of the critics who complain that the selections focus on ‘women’s issues’ or ‘women’s books,’ and wonder where they were over the years when virtually the entire canon focused on ‘men’s books.’ . . . I admire what she has done for reading in America.”

“Many of the white women who wrote to me expressed surprise that they could relate so easily to the black characters in my book. I think that’s part of what Oprah’s Book Club does. It allows people to be drawn into different worlds that they might never encounter in real life through the safe space that fiction can create. I think that’s always a good thing.”

“Before Oprah I had a small literary audience, primarily in the South. The Oprah selection gave me a large national and international audience. . . . Oprah has given me a great gift, of millions of readers.”

February 2005
230 pages, index, 6" x 9"
$24.95 Cloth
1-55728-782-1
Popular Culture/
American Literature