Oprah's Book Club | Harris County Public Library

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Oprah's Book Club

Submitted by admin on Tue, 05/05/2009 - 3:45pm

Book Clubs

Oprah's Book Club titles are books chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her show. Viewers are urged to read the books and then tune in to Oprah's show for a book discussion with the author. In 2003 the focus of the Book Club changed to classic works.

	September 2008 David Wroblewski. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle A tale reminiscent of "Hamlet" that also celebrates the alliance between humans and dogs follows speech-disabled Wisconsin youth Edgar, who bonds with three yearling canines and struggles to prove that his sinister uncle is responsible for his father's death.
	January 2008 Eckhart Tolle. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose Tolle presents readers with an honest look at the current state of humanity: he implores us to see and accept that this state, which is based on an erroneous identification with the egoic mind, is one of dangerous insanity. However, there is an alternative to this potentially dire situation. Humanity now, perhaps more than in any previous time, has an opportunity to create a new, saner, more loving world. This will involve a radical inner leap from the current egoic consciousness to an entirely new one. In illuminating the nature of this shift, Tolle describes in detail how our current ego-based state of consciousness operates. Then gently, and in very practical terms, he leads us into this new consciousness. We will come to experience who we truly are--which is something infinitely greater than anything we currently think we are.
	November 2007 Ken Follett. Pillars of the Earth Set in 12th-century England, the narrative concerns the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge. The ambitions of three men merge, conflict and collide through 40 years of social and political upheaval as internal church politics affect the progress of the cathedral and the fortunes of the protagonists..
	October 2007 Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Love In The Time of Cholera A patient Colombian man waits 50 years for a second chance with the love of his life.
	June 2007 Jeffrey Eugenides. Middlesex Spanning eight decades, Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.
	March 2007 Cormac McCarthy. The Road America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst the destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive. Still they persevere, and their relationship comes to represent goodness in a world that is utterly devastate.
	January 2007 Sidney Poitier. The Measure of a Man In this luminous memoir, a true American icon looks back on his celebrated life and career. His body of work is arguably the most morally significant in cinematic history, and the power and influence of that work are indicative of the character of the man behind the many storied roles. In "The Measure of a Man," Sidney Poitier explores these elements of character and personal values to take his own measure -- as a man, as a husband and a father, and as an actor. He explores the nature of sacrifice and commitment, pride and humility, rage and forgiveness, and paying the price for artistic integrity. What emerges is a picture of a man seeking truth, passion, and balance in the face of limits -- his own and the world's.
	January 2006 Elie Wiesel. Night A terrifying account of the Nazi death camp horror that turns a young Jewish boy into an agonized witness to the death of his family...the death of his innocence...and the death of his God. Penetrating and powerful, as personal as The Diary Of Anne Frank, Night awakens the shocking memory of evil at its absolute and carries with it the unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again
	September 2005 James Frey. A Million Little Pieces When he entered a residential treatment center at the age of twenty-three, James Frey had destroyed his body and his mind almost beyond repair. He faced a stark choice: accept that he wasn't going to see twenty-four or step into the fallout of his smoking wreck of a life and take drastic action. Surrounded by patients as troubled as he - including a judge, a mobster, a former world-champion boxer, and a fragile former prostitute - and a droning dogma of How to Recover, Frey had to fight to find his own way to confront the consequences of the life he had lived so far, and to determine what future, if any, he holds.
	June 2005 William Faulkner. Light In August The story od Lena Grove's search for the father of her unborn child, and features one of Faulkner's most memorable characters: Joe Christmas, a desperate drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.
	June 2005 William Faulkner. The Sound And The Fury By turns lyrical and dramatic, hilarious and heartbreaking, The Sound and the Fury is the tragic story of beautiful Caddy Comapson and the dissolution of her family.
	June 2005 William Faulkner. As I Lay Dying The harrowing, darkly comic tale of the Bundren family's trek across Mississippi to bury Addie, their wife and mother, as told by each of the family members--including Addie herself.
	September 2004 Pearl S. Buck. The Good Earth This great modern classic depicts life in China at a time before the vast political and social upheavals transformed an essentially agrarian country into a world power. Nobel Prize-winner Pearl S. Buck traces the whole cycle of life--its terrors, its passions, its ambitions, and rewards. Includes biographical and historical information and more.
	June 2004 Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina Anna Karenina has beauty, social position, wealth, a husband, and an adored son, but her existence seems empty. When she meets the dashing officer Count Vronsky she rejects her marriage and turns to him to fulfill her passionate nature -- with devastating results. One of the world's greatest novels, Anna Karenina is both an immortal drama of personal conflict and social scandal and a vivid, richly textured panorama of nineteenth-century Russia.
	April 2004 Carson McCullers. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter A sensitive teenage girl discovers the meaning of loneliness.
	January 2004 Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude A classic of world literature for all time--and probably Marquez's most famous work. "The first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race . . . with more lucidity, wit, wisdom, and poetry than is expected from 100 years of novelists, let alone one man".--Washington Post Book World.
	September 2003 Alan Paton. Cry, the Beloved Country Paton's deeply moving story of Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set against the backdrop of a land and people driven by racial inequality and injustice, remains the most famous and important novel in South Africa's history.
	June 2003 John Steinbeck. East of Eden This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks and the Hamiltons--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
	April 2002 Toni Morrison. Sula Written by one of the most important novelists in America today, Sula is a rich and moving novel that traces the lives of two black heroines--from their growing up together in a small Ohio town, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.
	January 2002 Ann-Marie MacDonald. Fall on Your Knees A bestseller in Canada, this riveting family saga takes readers from Cape Breton Island to the battlefields of World War I to New York City's jazz scene--and into the lives, and guilty secrets, of four remarkable sisters.
	November 2001 Rohinton Mistry. A Fine Balance The eagerly awaited novel from the author of the award-winning Such a Long Journey is set in India in the mid-1970s. A "State of Internal Emergency" has been declared, and in the days of bleakness and hope that follow, four disparate people find their lives becoming unexpectedly and inextricably entwined.
	September 2001 Jonathan Franzen. The Corrections A comic, tragic masterpiece of an American family breaking down in an age of easy fixes, Franzen's third novel brings an old-time America into wild collision with the era of home surveillance and New Economy speculation. Winner of the National Book Award.
	June 2001 Lalita Tademy. Cane River Based on the author's own search of her family's past, "Cane River" is an epic novel based on the lives of four generations of African-American women. Beginning with Tademy's great-great-great-great-grandmother, Elisabeth, this is a saga that sweeps from the early days of slavery through the Civil War and into a pre-Civil Rights South--a unique and moving slice of America's past that will resonate with readers for years to come.
	May 2001 Malika Oufkir. Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail The adopted daughter of the king of Morocco, whose father was arrested and executed for a 1972 attempt to assassinate the king, tells the story of how she, her mother, and her five siblings endured years of imprisonment in a desert penal colony
	March 2001 Gwyn Hyman Rubio. Icy Sparks The grown up Icy narrates her story of growing up an orphan in rural Kentucky in the 50s with an affliction that causes tics and cursing.
	January 2001 Joyce Carol Oates. We Were the Mulvaneys This story spans 25 years in the life of one American family--its rise, fall, and ultimate redemption.
	November 2000 Andre Dubus III. House of Sand and Fog An American tragedy, "The House of Sand and Fog" turns both the traditional immigrant success story and a modern love story upside down with a heartrending outcome in a master stroke of American realism and Shakespearean consequence.
	September 2000 Christina Schwarz. Drowning Ruth Amanda Starkey nurses soldiers wounded in the Great War. When she is overwhelmed she flees to the lake with her younger sister and three year old niece Ruth.
	August 2000 Elizabeth Berg. Open House Fourteen-year-old Holly Fay Lovell leaves the small southern town where she lives with her mother, a seamstress, in order to pursue her dream of a singing career, not knowing the whole truth about her humble beginnings.
	June 2000 Barbara Kingsolver. The Poisonwood Bible In her first novel since "Pigs in Heaven", Kingsolver offers a compelling exploration of religion, conscience, imperialist arrogance, and the many paths to redemption. An American missionary and his family travel to the Congo in 1959, a time of tremendous political and social upheaval. Web feature.
	May 2000 Sue Miller. While I Was Gone A decade after her phenomenal bestseller, "The Good Mother", Miller delivers an exquisitely suspenseful novel about how casually a marriage can be destroyed and how a good wife can place all she holds dear at risk.
	April 2000 Toni Morrison. The Bluest Eye The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others -- who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
	March 2000 Tawni O'Dell. Back Roads With his abusive father dead and his mother in jail, 19-year-old Harley Altmyer has given up on college to care for three needy younger sisters. Can he rise to the occasion? More important, will the sexy mom of his baby sister's best friend provide a much-needed tumble in the hay?
	February 2000 Isabel Allende. Daughter of Fortune From acclaimed international bestselling author Isabel Allende comes this dazzling historical novel, a sweeping portrait of an unconventional woman carving her own destiny in an era defined by violence, passion, and adventure.
	January 2000 Robert Morgan. Gap Creek Gap Creek is the gripping story of one young woman's courage in the face of the hardships of 19th-century country life. In Julie Harmon, a woman of strength, grace and immeasurable courage, Robert Morgan has created one of the most admirable and unforgettable heroines in modern American literature.
	December 1999 Jane Hamilton. A Map of the World One June morning, Alice Goodwin is trying to keep both her tempter and her tendency to blame herself for her entire family's shortcomings in check. Torn between a yearning for solitude and a deep need to be at the center of a perfect family, Alice finds life on the Goodwin farm isn't turning out quite as she had envisioned.
	November 1999 A. Manette Ansay. Vinegar Hill Dutifully accompanying her unemployed husband back to her in-law's cold and loveless house, Ellen Grier finds that she must struggle to keep her passionate spirit alive as she searches for the inner strength to endure an all-pervading darkness that threatens to destroy everything she is and everyone she loves.
	October 1999 Breena Clarke. River, Cross My Heart Six-year-old Clara Bynum is dead, drowned in the Potomac River in the shadow of an apparently haunted rock outcropping known locally as the Three Sisters. In scenes alive with emotional truth, the story weighs the effect of Clara's absence on the people she has left behind: her parents; the family's friends and relatives in their Georgetown neighborhood; and, most especially, Clara's twelve-year-old sister Johnnie Mae, who must come to terms with her sister's death as she struggles to discover the kind of woman she will become.
	September 1999 Maeve Binchy. Tara Road The story about two women who switch lives, and by so doing, learn much about each other -- and themselves. Set in both Ireland and New England, "Tara Road" demonstrates Binchy's incomparable understanding of the human heart.
	June 1999 Melinda Haynes. Mother of Pearl This debut work captures the irony and beauty of life in the 1950s Deep South, centering around 28-year-old Even Grade, a Mississippi black man who grew up an orphan, and Valuable Korner, the 15-year-old daughter of the town whore. Both are passionately determined to discover the precious things neither expected as children: human connection, enduring commitment, and above all, unconditional love.
	May 1999 Janet Fitch. White Oleander A bestselling first novel about a young woman growing up the hard way, this is a powerful story of mothers and daughters, their ambiguous alliances, and the search for love and identity. When a woman murders a former lover and is imprisoned for life, her daughter must navigate a new reality--that of a series of foster homes, each its own universe, each with its own limits and dangers. "A ferocious, risk-loving novel."--"Los Angeles Times Book Review."
	March 1999 Anita Shreve. The Pilot's Wife A pilot's wife is taught to be prepared for the late-night knock at the door. But when Kathryn Lyons receives word that a plane flown by her husband, Jack, has exploded near the coast of Ireland, she confronts the unfathomable-one startling revelation at a time. Soon drawn into a maelstrom of publicity fueled by rumors that Jack led a secret life. Kathryn sets out to learn who her husband really was, whatever that knowledge might cost. Her search propels this taut, impassioned book as it movingly explores the question, How well can we ever really know another person.
	February 1999 Bernhard Schlink. The Reader Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany.
	January 1999 Bret Lott. Jewel In the backwoods of Mississippi, a land of honeysuckle and grapevine, Jewel and her husband, Leston, are truly blessed; they have five fine children. When Brenda Kay is born in 1943, Jewel gives thanks for a healthy baby, last-born and most welcome. "Jewel" is the story of how quickly a life can change; how, like lightning, an unforeseen event can set us on a course without reason or compass.
	December 1998 Billie Letts. Where the Heart Is Abandoned by her boyfriend at a Wal-Mart in Oklahoma, Novalee Nation, 17 years old and seven months pregnant, soon discovers the treasures hiding in this small Southwest town.
	October 1998 Chris Bohjalian. Midwives On an icy winter night in an isolated house in rural Vermont, a seasoned midwife named Sibyl Danforth takes desperate measures to save a baby's life. She performs an emergency cesarean section on a mother she believes has died of a stroke. but what if Sibyl's patient wasn't dead - and Sibyl inadvertently killed her? As Sibyl faces the antagonism of the law, the hostility of traditional doctors, and the accusations of her own conscience, Midwives engages, moves, and transfixes us as only the very best novels ever do.
	September 1998 Pearl Cleage. What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day This highly praised debut novel by a renowned African-American playwright/essayist is a gritty yet warm and inspiring story of hope, love, and homecoming.
	June 1998 Wally Lamb. I Know This Much is True The primary action is narrated by Dominick Birdsey, the identical twin of Thomas, a schizophrenic. At age 40, Dominick confronts his imperfect past. He is faced with the challenge of expiating his and his ancestors' sins and renovating his life. Here the author confronts the existential aloneness of the human condition.
	May 1998 Edwidge Danticat. Breath, Eyes, Memory An unforgettable novel that shimmers with the wonder and terror of its author's native Haiti. Set in the island's impoverished villages and in New York's Haitian community, this is the story of Sophie Caco, who was conceived in an act of violence, abandoned by her mother and then summoned to America. In New York, Sophie discovers that Haiti imposes harsh rules on its own.
	April 1998 Anna Quindlen. Black and Blue A stunning novel about a marriage that begins in passion and becomes violent, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author of "Thinking Out Loud". After she runs away from her abusive husband, Fran Benedetto lives in fear of discovery, yet also with increasing confidence, freedom, and hope, as she struggles to create a new life for herself and her son.
	March 1998 Alice Hoffman. Here on Earth After nearly 20 years of living in California, March Murray and her daughter Gwen return to March's small Massachusetts hometown. Thrust into the world of her past, March slowly comes to realize the complexity of the choices made by those around her, including Hollis, the boy she loved--now the man she can't seem to stay away from.
	January 1998 Toni Morrison. Paradise "The last classic American writer" ("Newsweek") challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth, into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and the way a society can turn in on itself until it explodes.
	December 1997 Bill Cosby. The Best Way to Play Little Bill and his friends, avid fans of the television show "Space Explorers," clamor to get the video game version, but they find that they have more fun using their imagination while playing outside.
	December 1997 Bill Cosby. The Meanest Thing to Say When a new boy in his second grade class tries to get the other students to play a game that involves saying the meanest things possible to one another, Little Bill shows him a better way to make friends.
	December 1997 Bill Cosby. The Treasure Hunt One rainy day while his father listens to his old records, his mother polishes a silver platter, and his brother enjoys his baseball card collection, Little Bill discovers his own treasure , a talent for storytelling.
	October 1997 Kaye Gibbons. Ellen Foster Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.
	October 1997 Kaye Gibbons. A Virtuous Woman In flashbacks, two richly cadenced Southern voices explore vastly different backgrounds, troubled histories and an unlikely but loving marriage. - Publishers Weekly review.
	September 1997 Ernest J Gaines. A Lesson Before Dying Black schoolteacher, Grant Wiggins, restores a sense of dignity to Jefferson, a black man wrongly condemned to die. The setting is a small 1940s Cajun Louisiana community.
	June 1997 Mary McGarry Morris. Songs in Ordinary Time Songs in Ordinary Time is set in the summer of 1960 - the last of quiet times and America's innocence. It centers on Marie Fermoyle, a strong but vulnerable divorced woman whose loneliness and ambition for her children make her easy prey for the dangerous con man Omar Duvall.
	May 1997 Maya Angelou. The Heart of a Woman This engaging book chronicles the changes in Maya Angelou's life as she enters the hub of activity that is New York. There, at the Harlem Writers Guild, she rededicates herself to writing, and finds love at an unexpected moment. Reflecting on her many roles--from northern coordinator of Martin Luther King's history-making quest to mother of a rebellious teenage son--Angelou eloquently speaks to an awareness of the heart within us all.
	April 1997 Sheri Reynolds. The Rapture of Canaan From the author of Bitterroot Landing--hailed by the Richmond State as "a splendid contribution to Southern literature"--comes a stunning story woven around the themes of innocence and miracles in everyday life. When the granddaughter of the founder of an isolated religious community in South Carolina is discovered to be pregnant, no amount of punishment will make her recant her statement that a holy child grows inside her.
	February 1997 Ursula Hegi. Stones from the River A stunning novel about ordinary people living in extraordinary times--set in a small German town and spanning both world wars. Through the voice of the town's unofficial historian and conscience, Hegi explores the secrets, the actions, and lack of action that shapes the residents' fates.
	January 1997 Wally Lamb. She's Come Undone An extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, She's Come Undone tells the story of Dolores Price, a dysfunctional, heartbreakingly comical young heroine, and her wild journey to love, pain, and renewal.
	November 1996 Jane Hamilton. The Book of Ruth A standout in the crowd of first novels, Ruth narrates a story that confronts real-life issues of alienation and violence from which Hamilton creates a stunning testament to the human capacity for mercy, compassion, and love.
	November 1996 Toni Morrison. Song of Solomon In Song of Solomon, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison creates a new way of rendering the contradictory nuances of black life in America. The novel's earthy, poetic language and striking use of folklore and myth helped establish Morrison as a major voice in contemporary fiction.
	September 1996 Jacquelyn Mitchard. The Deep End of the Ocean An unforgettable debut of a major storyteller, this bestselling novel recounts every mother's most terrifying nightmare: the disappearance of her child.