Oprah Winfrey reveals the seven books getting her through 2020, from Mary Oliver to James Baldwin
With Election Day approaching and the pandemic ongoing, Winfrey is setting aside her usual book club recommendations
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Your support makes all the difference.Oprah Winfrey has revealed which books are getting her through 2020, as Election Day approaches and the pandemic goes on.
Setting aside her usual book club recommendations, Winfrey instead cites seven personal favorites, ranging from James Baldwin’s landmark essays in The Fire Next Time to Mary Oliver's poetry collection Devotions.
Winfrey is calling her choices “the books that see me through,” works she values for “their ability to comfort, inspire, and enlighten”.
“It’s a mix of fiction, poetry, non-fiction and spirituality, books I know and trust and revisit time and again,” she said in a statement Monday.
Her new list, announced in partnership with Apple, includes Eckhart Tolle's spiritual guide The Power of Now and a classic novel she picked in 1996 for her book club, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.
Winfrey also chose Ta-Nehisi Coates’s prize-winning book on race and police violence, Between the World and Me; historian Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America: The Battle For Our Better Angels; and an anthology edited by US poet laureate Joy Harjo, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry.
Winfrey will “dive deeper into each book” on Instagram but will not be airing interviews on Apple TV Plus, as she has done with other picks since she signed with the streaming platform in 2019.
The TV personality had planned a new choice every two months; her previous selection, Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, was announced in early August.
Winfrey spokesperson Chelsea Hettrick said the seven books announced on Monday would serve as “a bridge between selections,” and that no firm timeline had been set for future choices.
“This year has brought such unprecedented change overall,” she said. “We will re-evaluate in the coming weeks the selection plan and timing for the remainder of 2020.”
Oprah’s book club started in 1996 as a segment of Winfrey’s talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show. It ended in 2011 at the same time as the programme concluded.
It was revived as Oprah's Book Club 2.0 in 2012. In March 2019, she announced that a televised version would air on Apple TV+.