It started with Oprah, as many things do. In 1996 America’s most beloved talk show host launched her “book club” on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Each month a new novel was selected by Oprah, beamed into the homes of millions, and in many cases forever altered the fortunes of the writer. After a 2007 plug, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road saw an increase in sales to the tune of a million copies; when she chose Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye in 2000, it enjoyed a sales bump in the region of 800,000. Morrison had already won the Nobel Prize seven years prior.
Not everyone was satisfied with the deus ex machina of the Oprah endorsement. In 2001 Jonathan Franzen was troubled by The Corrections’ appearance on the feted list. Oprah may have picked some good books, he conceded, “but she’s picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe”. It’s hard to imagine such truculence these days from authors, who are subject to the whims of the celebrity endorsement more than ever. Winfrey may have been first, but in recent years Emma Watson, Dua Lipa and Reese Witherspoon are among a slew of stars who have produced their own iteration. Cindy Crawford’s photogenic daughter Kaia Gerber recommends her millions of followers a Plato dialogue, a book by the Californian writer and artist Eve Babitz, a 1965 semi-autobiographical French novel by Albertine Sarrazin. If the highbrow still has no place in the clasp of an A-lister, then someone should alert 2001 Franzen to this young woman immediately.
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