The Return of Oprahs Book Club

MANILA, Philippines --- Oprah Winfrey, the publishing industrys unrivaled tastemaker, will revive her popular book club next week after a two-year hiatus, promising the book business some of the sales and publicity it thought had vanished along with her weekday talk show.

The move could also be a boon for her beleaguered cable channel, OWN, which has struggled with low ratings.

For her first pick, Oprah has chosen Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, a non-fiction retelling of the authors epic hike of the Pacific Crest Trail that was published in March by Knopf.

I want to shout it from the mountaintop, I love this book so much and want to talk about it so much, I knew I had to reinvent my book club, Oprah writes in the July issue of O magazine

While calling the new version Oprahs Book Club 2.0, Oprah will resuscitate many of the familiar markers of its first incarnation, including the sticker on the jacket of print books that proudly designates the title as sanctioned by Ms. Winfrey.

Updating The Club

But in a nod to the millions of readers who have abandoned print books for e-books, Oprah has updated the club with digital and social-media elements. The e-book versions of the selected book, for instance, will include margin notes from Oprah highlighting her favorite passages.

This is a book club for the way people live and read today, Sheri Salata, the president of OWN, said in a statement. In addition to the traditional way, we also access books on smartphones, e-readers and tablets and we talk to our friends about them through social media. Oprahs Book Club 2.0 takes the Oprah.com online community, readers of O Magazine and OWN viewers and connects them through their shared love of great books.

Before she stopped selecting books altogether in 2010, Oprah had picked 65 books since 1996, a mix of contemporary and classic works. For many years, a books selection as an Oprah-sanctioned title translated into instantly skyrocketing sales of more th! an a mil lion copies, extraordinary numbers for any title.

In 2002, Oprah temporarily put her book club on hold, but picked it up a year later with classic novels like East of Eden by John Steinbeck. The last titles in 2010, were A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations.

Her greatest influence remained in plucking new books from the pile, often lifting a little-known author like Jacquelyn Mitchard or Anita Shreve to household-name status.

In the new version of her book club, Oprah will solicit questions from readers on Facebook and Twitter, using the hashtag #oprahsbookclub, and answer the questions online.

Resilience And Self-invention

Wild is the kind of story of resilience and self-invention that Oprah has championed.

Confronted with a life that was falling apart author Strayeds mother had died of cancer, her marriage to a kind-hearted man had broken up she set off for California on a solo, months-long, treacherous hike through the desert and mountains.

Writing in The New York Times, Dwight Garner said the book had reduced him to a puddle of tears in a coffee shop. Its uplifting, but not in the way of many memoirs, where the uplift makes you feel that youre committing mental suicide, he wrote. This book is as loose and sexy and dark as an early Lucinda Williams song. Its got a punk spirit and makes an earthy and American sound.