Week 7 Prompt Response

In much the same way as reviewers’ featuring of a small set of chosen works is not exactly “fair,” the instant fame provided by a recommendation such as Oprah’s may not be fair either--but is in my opinion less problematic. Book reviewers at least purportedly act as neutral agents communicating the relative worth or worthlessness of books to a general public audience, but their success at this is arguable precisely because the general public which they seek to serve constitutes such a vast and diverse group of people. Oprah’s book club, on the other hand, holds as its audience a very specific--if not small--group of people: watchers of Oprah. I think this knowledge of audience positively influences Oprah’s selections and makes the unavoidable bias of her choices more excusable, as Oprah watchers have, in a sense “elected” Oprah to select books which they are likely to enjoy by watching her show.


That being said, I know I would feel differently about Oprah’s disproportionate influence if she were, for example, a conservative talk show host using her clout to promote bigoted or hateful texts. It is because of my own biases that I find Oprah’s recommendations, which so often uplift the works of authors belonging to marginalized communities, admissible and even commendable. Of course, those conservative celebrities are surely out there with their book clubs as well, as are a great number of other celebrities with their own book clubs, an expanding phenomenon assisted by social media. What is perhaps most remarkable about Oprah’s Book Club, then, is simply its vastness, as even those who may have never watched Oprah or read anything she’s recommended, will likely still be familiar with her book club and recognize its insignia when they come across it in the book store. Whereas I couldn’t think, off the top of my head, of even one other celebrity book club, though an internet search instantly informed me of Emma Watson’s, Emma Roberts’, Lena Dunham’s, and Reese Witherspoon’s. In the process of this search, I also came across a short article by an advertising agency’s analyst looking into “Celebrity Book Clubs: What’s the Deal and What Can We Learn?”. I found that their conclusions clearly communicated some of my own positive feelings about celebrity book clubs: these “clubs” encourage reading, “rally people” around books, and--perhaps best of all--encourage communication about and critique of the chosen books. In our sped-up, dizzyingly media-saturated culture, someone who, with no more than an instagram post, can get people talking about a book with other people has my gratitude.