Oprah Winfrey started her eponymous book club way back in 1996 as a segment on her talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show. Decades later and the media mogul is still recommending titles that consistently earn spots on the bestseller lists. While it’s basically impossible to name a ‘best’ book among her 107 (so far) selections, I did sort through the list to cherry pick three titles I loved so much I wish I could read them again with fresh eyes.
3 Oprah's Book Club Picks I Wish I Could Read Again for the First Time
My faves of her 107 selections
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Published Oct 3, 2024
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1. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez has been one of my favorite writers since I was in high school, and while Oprah’s Book Club didn’t select the title of his that’s stuck with me most—Of Love and Other Demons—it did select his 1967 masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which remains one of the most influential works of 20th-century fiction. In case you haven’t read it, it’s an epic that takes place over the course of a century and concerns seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional Macondo. Marquez’s trademark magical realism shines as he explores isolation (the titular solitude), elitism, the circular nature of time and more. If my description seems vague, that’s because, despite reading One Hundred Years of Solitude multiple times (including in the original Spanish), I wouldn’t dare try to do it justice by summarizing the unforgettable plot—just trust me and pick up a copy.
2. Finding Me: A Memoir by Viola Davis
I, perhaps unfairly, tend to write off “celebrity books” as vanity projects that tell variations of the same story. I’m so glad I put aside my biases with Viola Davis’s 2022 memoir, because…wow. In Finding Me, Davis reflects on family, love, motherhood and acting. From her childhood in a crumbling apartment in Rhode Island with an abusive, alcoholic father to her time at Juilliard to the present, she writes in intimate detail about the courageousness, grit and almost unmatched talent that helped her get to where she is today. I of course admired her as a performer going into the book (The New York Times ranked Davis ninth on its list of the greatest actors of the 21st century in 2020, after all), but reading her story gave me an incredible appreciation for who she seems to be as a person as well.
3. Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue
This one has a special place in my heart: Behold the Dreamers was one of the first books I remember reviewing for PureWow. In it, a Cameroonian immigrant named Jende moves to Harlem in search of a better life for himself, his wife Neni and their 6-year-old son Liomi (who both eventually join him stateside). It’s fall of 2007 and Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for a senior executive at Lehman Brothers—the executive’s wife even offers Neni temporary work at the family’s summer home in the Hamptons. Jende and Neni can finally imagine a brighter future, but soon enough, Lehman Brothers collapses, and Jende and Neni are desperate to keep Jende’s job as they struggle with immigration issues, marital troubles and more. The plot touches on immigration, the class divide, the false promise of the American Dream and the bonds that hold families together—and it’s truly unforgettable.
