Oprah says her 100th book club pick 'Hello Beautiful' is 'one of the best books I've read'

It's been a while since Oprah Winfrey started her famous book club in 1996, when her first pick of Jacquelyn Mitchard's "The Deep End of the Ocean" led copies to fly off bookshelves. Now, the media mogul is making her 100th book selection: "Hello Beautiful" by Ann Napolitano.

Winfrey celebrated the monumental moment on Instagram Tuesday.

"It was over 26 years ago that I started Oprah's book club because I wanted to get the whole country reading and connecting over what I thought were great stories," Winfrey said in a video. "I wasn't sure at the time that the idea would kind of work, but here we are."

Winfrey said Nopolitano's book pays homage to Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" as it follows a family of four sisters over three decades in a city meaningful to Winfrey, Chicago. She aired her eponymous talk show for 25 seasons in the Windy City.

"There's drama, there's love, there's grief," Winfrey said of "Hello Beautiful."

"It is one of the best books I've read in a very long time. So happy it's the 100th selection."

Oprah Book Club gallery: See Oprah's book club’s 100th pick: 'Hello Beautiful' by Ann Napolitano

The 100th pick will follow a special six-week reading plan and April 13 discussion on the Oprah Daily website with Winfrey, Napolitano and several book club readers.

Napolitano is the best selling author of 2020's "Dear Edward." Her latest, "Hello Beautiful" was published Tuesday by Dial Press, a Penguin Random House imprint.

Since 1996, Winfrey’s book choices have set her on a journey of extraordinary influence and success, frequent reinvention and the occasional controversy. It has endured through changes for both Winfrey and the publishing industry, through the rise of the internet and the end of Winfrey’s syndicated talk show, through immersions in the classics and unexpected lessons in the reliability of memoirs and the lack of diversity of book publishing.

Thanks to Winfrey, contemporary authors such as Mitchard and Jane Hamilton found audiences they never imagined, while picks published decades or even centuries earlier, from "Anna Karenina" to "As I Lay Dying," placed high on bestseller lists.

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Contributing: The Associated Press

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Oprah's 100th book club pick is Ann Napolitano's 'Hello Beautiful'