Oprah Winfrey’s wildly successful bookclub is being relaunched as Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, a social media book club. Her first selection is Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail by Cheryl Strayed, the “story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.”
Michael Schaub of NPR said Wild was: “One of the most original, heartbreaking and beautiful American memoirs in years. . . . The unlikely journey is awe-inspiring, but it’s one of the least remarkable things about the book. Strayed, who was recently revealed as the anonymous author of the ‘Dear Sugar’ advice column of the literary website The Rumpus, writes with stunningly authentic emotional resonance—Wild is brutal and touching in equal measures, but there’s nothing forced about it. She chronicles sorrow and loss with unflinching honesty, but without artifice or self-pity. There are no easy answers in life, she seems to be telling the reader. Maybe there are no answers at all. It’s fitting, perhaps, that the writer chose to end her long pilgrimage at the Bridge of the Gods, a majestic structure that stretches a third of a mile across the Columbia, the largest river in the Pacific Northwest. We think of bridges as separating destinations, just as we think of long journeys as the price we have to pay to get from one place to another. Sometimes, though, the journey is the destination, and the bridge connects more than just dots on a map—it joins reality with the dream world, the living with the dead, the tame with the wild.”
In Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 members can note Oprah’s favorite book passages (in the digital edition) and there will be many extras including interviews with authors, cut book passages, and backstories. You can join the book club at the website, on Facebook and on Twitter by using the hastag #OprahsBookClub.
