# Oprah's Book Club 2.0

Oprah's Book Club 2.0 is a book club founded June 1, 2012, by Oprah Winfrey in a joint project between OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network and O: The Oprah Magazine. The club is a re-launch of the original Oprah's Book Club, which ran for 15 years and ended in 2011, but as the "2.0" name suggests, digital media is the new focus. It incorporates the use of various social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter) and e-readers that allow for the quoting and uploading of passages and notes for discussion, among other features.
On March 25, 2019, Apple Inc. and Oprah announced a revival of a video version of Oprah's Book Club that will air on Apple TV+.

## History

The book club was announced June 1, 2012. Critics at the time pointed out that her online audience was not as large as it was previously with network television, and the new club would be a test if she still had the "Oprah Effect" with the reading public to create hits as before. As the New York Times Book Review reported a few months later, in the August 19 issue, Cheryl Strayed's Wild had dropped off the New York Times Best Seller List by May 20, but after its selection by Oprah in early June, it reached No. 1 Non-fiction by July 15, and stayed there for many weeks, thus, said the Times, confirming the "Oprah Effect" still worked.

## Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selections

| Date | Author | Title |
| June 2012 | Cheryl Strayed | Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail |
| December 2012 | Ayana Mathis | The Twelve Tribes of Hattie |
| January 2014 | Sue Monk Kidd | The Invention of Wings |
| February 2015 | Cynthia Bond | Ruby |
| August 2016 | Colson Whitehead | The Underground Railroad |
| September 2016 | Glennon Doyle Melton | Love Warrior |
| June 2017 | Imbolo Mbue | Behold the Dreamers |
| February 2018 | Tayari Jones | An American Marriage |
| June 2018 | Anthony Ray Hinton | The Sun Does Shine |
| November 2018 | Michelle Obama | Becoming |
| September 2019 | Ta-Nehisi Coates | The Water Dancer |
| November 2019 | Elizabeth Strout | Olive, Again |
| April 2020 | Robert Kolker | Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family |
| June 2020 | James McBride | Deacon King Kong |
| November 2020 | Isabel Wilkerson | Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents |
| March 2021 | Marilynne Robinson | Gilead; Home; Lila; Jack |
| June 2021 | Nathan Harris | The Sweetness of Water |
| August 2021 | Honorée Fanonne Jeffers | The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois |
| September 2021 | Richard Powers | Bewilderment |
| February 2022 | Martha Beck | The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self |
| April 2022 | Viola Davis | Finding Me |
| June 2022 | Leila Mottley | Nightcrawling |
| September 2022 | Jarvis Jay Masters | That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row |
| October 2022 | Barbara Kingsolver | Demon Copperhead |
| February 2023 | Susan Cain | Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole |
| March 2023 | Ann Napolitano | Hello Beautiful |
| May 2023 | Abraham Verghese | The Covenant of Water |
| September 2023 | Nathan Hill | Wellness |
| October 2023 | Jesmyn Ward | Let Us Descend |
| February 2024 | Lara Love Hardin | The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing |
| May 2024 | Colm Tóibín | Long Island |
| June 2024 | David Wroblewski | Familiaris |
| September 2024 | Elizabeth Strout | Tell Me Everything |
| October 2024 | Lisa Marie Presley, Riley Keough | From Here to the Great Unknown |
| December 2024 | Claire Keegan | Small Things Like These |
| January 2025 | Eckhart Tolle | A New Earth (also selected in 2008) |
| February 2025 | Eric Puchner | Dream State |
| March 2025 | Amy Griffin | The Tell |

## Controversies

On January 21, 2020, Oprah announced her next book club selection would be American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. The novel, about a Mexican woman fleeing to America after being targeted by a drug cartel, came under scrutiny as Cummins was a white woman with no connection to Mexico and marketing for the book claimed she had a special connection to the material because her husband had at one point been an undocumented immigrant without ever revealing he was a white Irishman. 142 authors including R. O. Kwon, Tommy Orange and Valeria Luiselli penned an open letter asking Oprah to rescind her endorsement of the book.
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell was originally selected for March 2020, but dropped after Russell was accused, without evidence, of plagiarizing Wendy C. Ortiz's 2014 memoir Excavation. According to the Associated Press, "Reviewers who looked at both books saw no evidence of plagiarism."