Interesting subject matter but was complicated reading. Skim read as some sentences took up a whole paragraph and it was hard work

Oprah's book club books are generally not my style (though we seem to overlap in our taste in memoirs (and The Road!), I generally prefer less realistic themes and more space ships) so I am not personally invested in what the world thinks of her book club. I picked this up because a friend was writing a paper on the book club and I ended up getting curious about the whole notion, so I nabbed her copy of this before it had to go back to the library.

I really liked it. It neither praised Oprah to high heaven nor totally denigrated her. Rooney won me over pretty quickly by using an example (which I now cannot find) of punching someone in the face and explaining exactly why she thought certain of Oprah's book selections were horrible (though she also explained why far more of them were great). She concludes, overall, that the first incarnation of the book club was a positive phenomenon, encouraging increased reading among people previously unlikely to pick up a book, but that it often ended up dumbing down the books, discouraging critical reading or people with negative opinions. (This is not a spoiler because she tells you she's going to conclude this way right in the introduction.)

A fairly balanced analysis of the Oprah's Book Club phenomenon. Rooney examines the high- vs. low-brow debate when evaluating the criticisms launched at the first incarnation of the book club (known as OBC I). She also brings the matter of "truthiness" to the table when looking at the James Frey debacle and how it was handled far differently than the dust-up with Jonathan Franzen. Rooney has a nice style, academic but not boringly so, and she did a great job taking the OBC through its various stages. I was struck by one fact Rooney points out in her criticism that the OBC I discussions tended toward the vapid and overly positive - the audience members at the bookclub taping Rooney attended were not allowed to bring anything into the studio with them, not even the book under discussion (Fall on Your Knees).

I've never been an OBC devotee which is why I wanted to read Rooney's book. I don't really "get" the massiveness of the OBC phenomenon and I was hoping Rooney could shed some light on that (she does). In truth, I have never seen an entire episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show (I watched most of an episode dealing with teen girls and bullies/abuse and the author of Queen Bees and Wannabes was a guest, I think). I am most definitely not Oprah's target audience (I'm not home during the day and don't record daytime TV for later viewing) and really am entirely unaffected by Oprah's magic recommendations. I do admire what Oprah did for reading, I really do - to get so many people to at least purchase a book when adult literacy wan't looking good is an admirable thing. I think on the whole most of the OBC title picks were made up of good books that were overtly readable.

Where Oprah has always driven me nuts is that somehow people turn into sheep when she makes a recommendation - they don't come to the store asking for Faulkner, Steinbeck, Morrison, or McCarthy, they come in asking for "Oprah's book." Come on, it has a title and an author, Oprah didn't write it, and the idea that people blindly start reading the same title en masse has always struck me as a little offputting. So I always made the conscious decision to NOT read a book because Oprah said it was good. I spent at least an hour with a hairdryer peeling the Oprah sticker off The Road (that thing had sticky glue) because I had been planning to buy it on release in paperback and didn't want to look like a sheep. I'm happy to say that my taste overlaps a bit with Oprah (I've read 12 picks and several others have been in my TBR longlist for a while), but she's not my book guru.

Pretty sure Kat is. :P

Please see my review for The Name of the Rose. Really.

Theoretically interestin, but such an intellectual discussion that it quickly became boring. More like reading a thesis. Skimmed firsthalf. Has list of OBC books. Highbrow vs. lowbrow lit -- Oprah = "middlebrow"....

oh this book made me feel like i really KNEW all the characters.
hha, no, a joke, sorry. a re-working of author's dissertation into a bit more easily digested study of obc and how it worked and its impact on tv, books sellers, authors, other tv shows, book clubs, and even the o herownself. some take aways: tv kills your brain, do not watch it, even or especially if talking about books ; the o did something no one . no one, in the history of books and readers has ever done, pushed, non religiously and non commercially (of the actual product anyway, she WAS selling herself/show but that is a different matter) books and reading to such an extent she effected whole industries, whole fucking continents. weird huh.
has nice bibliography and list of obc picks.

see this review by 'paul' for a much more comprehensive and frankly, wonderful reivew https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Read this for an event at the store. I enjoyed the discussion of the part the book club played in aggravating entrenched ideas of high vs. low culture.

it seemed the author had an [negative] opinion of the oprah book club, told the book club to prove her wrong, when it didn't she wrote this book. there are times when the assumptions she makes about how readers read and why readers read are so incorrect its frustrating, and times when this book is super insightful. overall pretty irritating

Many parts of this book were interesting. I especially liked the discussion about elitist reading...high brow versus low brow culture. I was also intrigued with Rooney's chapter on the impact of television on reading. All in all, pretty good stuff. Decent bibliography too.