Oprah Says This Hobby Makes Her Feel Like a "Kid in a Candy Shop"
Every Sunday, Oprah is setting an intention for the upcoming week—exclusively for Oprah Insiders. Join us for reflections on themes like resilience, representation, renewal, and more. This week, Oprah shares a message about the power of reading.
Happy Sunday again Oprah Insiders! We made it through another week.
Hard to believe that it was way back in 1996 when I launched Oprah's Book Club and since then we have journeyed through so many pages together and had wonderful discussions. And that’s why I really started the book club in the first place. When I read a sentence or chapter or reach the last page of a book I love, for me there’s nothing better than to turn to another person who’s reading that very same book and sharing our experience of that book.
So you want to ask: Did they shed tears of sorrow and joy the first time they read Toni Morrison? Did they feel for Anna Karenina and root for her relationship with Count Vronsky, or did they think that romance was just doomed from day one? Were they as dazzled by Colson Whitehead and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s supernatural powers to reimagine the The Underground Railroad and The Water Dancer and the heroes who ran the underground railroad and the villains who made it their business to dismantle it? Did they recognize a little of Olive Kittredge’s crankiness in themselves? Well I sure did. Gayle now calls me Olive when I get upset about something. I also had many aha moments while reading Isabel Wilkerson’s monumental, groundbreaking Caste.
The best part of all this is that I still feel like a kid in a candy shop every time I open a new book and feel that delicious sense of being transported that happens again and again. I was sent an early copy of Nathan Harris’s The Sweetness of Water, which is my new book club pick for Oprah’s Book Club. It’s the 91st selection I’ve made, and yet I’m as excited about this fabulous first novel as I’ve been about any other book. So if you haven’t started it yet, be prepared to root for enslaved brothers Prentiss and Landry to get a second chance at life just as they are liberated from the plantation on which they’ve toiled and suffered, and for your heart to leap to your throat when you sense danger around the corner for them.
I hope you’ll join me beginning Monday, June 21 when we start the OBC conversation around The Sweetness of Water, which you can follow on the Oprah's Book Club Instagram and Facebook. Then in July, tune in to AppleTV+, when I sit down with author Nathan Harris to find out more about what inspired him to write this extraordinary book. He's only 29 years old and wrote this!
Most of all, though, I thank you for all the companionship you’ve offered me over the years as we’ve embarked on this continuing love affair we all have with books. And I have to say: Reading it now as we just celebrated Juneteenth and the liberation and emancipation of enslavement, this is a good time to read this book, The Sweetness of Water. Have a great week!
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