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Oprah Winfrey

Recommendations

15 books they recommend

Books they recommend 15

Oprah's Book Club has operated in several phases since 1996: the original club on The Oprah Winfrey Show, a hiatus, a revival on the show, a move to O magazine, and most recently a standalone platform and collaboration with Apple TV+. The list draws from across all those eras. What holds it together is not genre but a particular seriousness about interiority — Oprah has been candid that she reads to understand herself and her guests, and the books she champions tend to be ones that changed how she thought about her own story. The club also has a track record of rescuing underread literary fiction, and announcements now run primarily through her Instagram.

Superbook reading list 15

Not yet given a topic 7

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpos
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Eckhart Tolle · not in an entry yet
source
“Selected in 2008 and paired with a first-of-its-kind 10-week online class with Tolle that drew over 2 million participants. It sits at the intersection of the club's two streams — inner-life nonfiction and books that generate conversation rather than just sales.”
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Cres
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Cheryl Strayed · not in an entry yet
source
“Cheryl Strayed's memoir was selected in 2012 for the relaunched Book Club 2.0. Oprah has cited it as the book she recommended most personally that year — a story about rebuilding a self from wreckage that resonated with themes she'd explored across decades of broadcasting.”
Educated: A Memoir
Educated: A Memoir
Tara Westover · not in an entry yet
source
“Tara Westover's debut memoir was one of Oprah's most enthusiastic selections in recent years. She described it on her Instagram (which now serves as the club's primary announcement channel) as a book she couldn't stop thinking about for weeks.”
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Isabel Wilkerson · not in an entry yet
source
“Isabel Wilkerson's 2020 structural analysis of American racial hierarchy was selected shortly after publication. Oprah praised it for giving her a new vocabulary — arguing that 'caste' was a more precise frame than 'race' for understanding inherited hierarchy.”
The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiogra
The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography
Sidney Poitier · not in an entry yet
source
“Sidney Poitier's memoir about integrity and purpose was a personal recommendation Oprah returned to repeatedly on her show. The book's central question — how do you keep your values intact under pressure? — maps directly onto themes she has explored in her own public life.”
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Azar Nafisi · not in an entry yet
source
“Azar Nafisi's memoir about teaching forbidden literature under the Iranian theocracy was selected in 2003. Oprah praised it for making the stakes of reading feel literal — a reminder of what books cost in places where they're not taken for granted.”
James
James
Percival Everett · not in an entry yet
source
“Percival Everett's 2024 reimagining of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective was selected shortly after it won the Pulitzer. Oprah called it the most important novel she'd read in years — one that asked readers to reckon with who gets to be the subject of American literature.”

Fiction 6

Beloved
Beloved
Toni Morrison · not in an entry yet
source
“Toni Morrison's novel was Oprah's personal obsession long before she selected it. She produced and starred in the 1998 film adaptation after years of trying to bring it to screen. On her show she called it the book she would want with her on a desert island.”
Song of Solomon
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison · not in an entry yet
source
“Morrison's 1977 National Book Award winner — the selection that introduced many of Oprah's original audience to literary fiction at its most demanding. Oprah has cited it as the book that made her understand novels could do things no other form could.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston · not in an entry yet
source
“Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel was selected during the show's original run and became one of the club's biggest backlist sales stories. Oprah described Janie Crawford's voice as the first time she felt a Black woman's interiority fully on the page.”
The Road
The Road
Cormac McCarthy · not in an entry yet
source
“Cormac McCarthy's 2006 Pulitzer winner was a departure from the club's usual emotional register — spare, brutal, without resolution. Oprah's on-air conversation with the notoriously press-shy McCarthy remains one of the club's most-watched segments.”
Middlesex
Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides · not in an entry yet
source
“Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer-winning family saga was selected in 2002 during the original club's final season. Oprah was drawn to its multigenerational scope and its unflinching account of identity formation across bodies and borders.”
Normal People
Normal People
Sally Rooney · not in an entry yet
source
“Sally Rooney's second novel was selected for the Apple TV+ era of the club. Oprah described it as a book that captured something true about the difficulty of intimacy that she hadn't seen articulated that precisely before.”

Religion and Spirituality 1

The Power of Now
The Power of Now
Eckhart Tolle · not in an entry yet
source
“Eckhart Tolle's 1997 book became a global bestseller partly through Oprah's repeated endorsements across more than a decade. She has described it as one of a handful of books that genuinely changed her relationship with anxiety and the inner narrator.”

Biography and Memoir 1

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Dave Eggers · not in an entry yet
source
“Dave Eggers' semi-autobiographical debut was selected early in the club's history for its formal ambition and its portrayal of sudden loss. Oprah singled out the book's voice — self-aware, grieving, funny — as unlike anything else she'd encountered.”

Where they publish 4