My Oprah Rant...

Yesterday Oprah made her latest book pick - Night by Elie Wiesel; immediately it jumped to number one on Amazon.com. In fact this is what the list looked like as of today:

1. Night (Oprah's Books Club) - Elie Wiesel
2. A Million Little Pieces (Oprah's Book Club) - James Frey
3. Night - Elie Wiesel
7. My Friend Leonard - James Frey

"Night" appears not once but TWICE, once as the original version, and once newly branded with the big ugly "O" sticker as the now wholly owned by Oprah version. What is wrong with people? Are we really so devoid of individual thought that the only books that people read, are the ones we're told to read?

I imagine millions of people tuning into Oprah every day, fingers crossed, hoping against hope that today will be the day that the sovereign Queen of TV, Movies, Books, Fashion, Food, Home Decor and Music decides to reveal to us the shrieking masses, a tiny fragment of society that shall now be lauded and immortalized because - she Queen Oprah decided that she got a kick out of it.

A plug from Oprah is a sure sign that you will be a star, your book will be a bestseller, your album will turn gold - it must be the single greatest form of advertising available in North America. Only one writer in the history of the Oprah book club has turned her down - and as a result he sold even more books. While everyone was taken aback at how "rude" he was to Queen Oprah, perhaps we should have been applauding his brilliance.

I'm not suggesting that Oprah is doing something wrong by getting people to read - admittedly Oprah revolutionized the entire publishing industry when she started her book club many years ago. It's that every single book seems to a part of her personal agenda. Almost every book could be cut from the same template. Start with a pinch of racsim, some horrible event in history like slavery or the holocaust, a struggling woman usually hard done by a man, talk to and about God a lot, throw in a few gut wrenching, cliched moments - wrap it all up with a heartfelt ending and voila! Literary gold.

In always choosing books with such a narrow range, she has left out a huge variety of incredible books, and she herself actually RAN OUT of books to promote, because she had exhausted every possible "Oprah canned story" out there. So she turned to the classics. Again, I think it's wonderful that more people are reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, everyone should read One Hundred Years of Solitude at some point in their life - it's that people SHOULD have been reading it with out a celebrity telling them to.

I would love to do a poll of avid Oprah book readers, and first see if any of them actually understood One Hundred Years (as I'm guessing this isn't the usual fodder for her average reader), but if they have ever read any book OUTSIDE of Queen Oprah's list?

Oprah has named three books that in my opinion everyone should read (these are some of the few that have fallen outside of her prescribed formula):

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
3. Fall on your Knees - Anne Marie MacDonald

Let me state that I've read parts of almost all of her books - I'm an avid reader and I like to know what's out there and what's actually worth reading.

And, don't even get me started on Toni Morrison...

Now you would have thought all this would make me lose my appetite? Sadly it didn't:

English muffin and nutella - 4 pts.
Leftover pizza from last night - 7 pts.
Triscuits and creamcheese - 3 pts.
Yogurt - 1 pt.

Total 15 pts. I'm going over to Matthew's for dinner later, and he's making pasta... healthy pasta he promises. I'll count it all later.