Staffers at The Oprah Winfrey Show say they try to prevent leaks about which book their boss will be reading next in her monthly book club before the choice is announced on air, but publishers obviously need prep time. The folks at Scribner were told, essentially, You may want to order an extra billion copies of STONES FROM THE RIVER (Scribner, $13), Ursula Hegi's wonderful, inventive 1994 novel about life in World War II Germany as seen through the eyes of a dwarf woman. They followed through. And two weeks ago, Stones was announced as the fifth and latest selection for Oprah's Book Club which, in the six months since it was launched, has turned every choice to date into a best-seller. ''This is a daring one,'' Oprah warned her fellow readers, before she began handing out copies to the studio audience. ''I really hope that you will stay with me. This book is pretty darn big, over 500 pages, to be exact, but the rewards are just as big.''
Her audience probably will stick it out, and if they do, they won't be disappointed: Oprah hasn't steered readers wrong yet. In fact, she has launched a reading revolution as powerful as anything John Grisham ever staged, encouraging customers who might have never set foot in such places before to become familiar with bookstores. But what's even more impressive is that Winfrey's book choices are so good. Poised effectively between high-fat mass-audience potboilers and thin highbrow lit, the five books that now occupy her book-club shelf cover a range of emotional territory that defines contemporary American literature at its most expressive and -- no coincidence -- its most female-friendly. Readers who have followed Oprah since October have encountered characters who are struggling to define what it is to be a family; figure out how to fit in and connect with others; come to terms with (if not exorcise) demons from their past; and express longing, desire, discontent, sadness, acceptance, and pleasure. Oprah's chosen literature reflects a contemporary taste for chatty introspection. It recognizes talent and superior quality. It reflects Oprah herself, at her best.
The book-club leader made her literary aesthetic clear from day one, page one. THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN (Viking, $23.95), a first novel by Wisconsin writer Jacquelyn Mitchard, captures family life at its most fragile, after a 3-year-old boy vanishes while in the care of his 7-year-old brother -- and then returns, just as shockingly, nine years later. Missing-child stories are, of course, always harrowing, but Mitchard also remembers to talk about love and hope.
It's no surprise, perhaps, that Winfrey turned to Toni Morrison for her second club date; the Nobel Prize-winning novelist has long been one of Winfrey's literary idols, and Oprah the producer continues to work on plans for a movie adaptation of Morrison's Beloved. But SONG OF SOLOMON (Plume/Penguin, $11.95), her 1977 novel that takes nothing less than the measure of the black American experience in the story of one man's fantastical life, was also an opportunity to introduce great storytelling by an important African-American writer to an audience that might never have thought to crack something so ''highfalutin.'' And Morrison, in turn, became the source of a quote Winfrey has used frequently and happily in the months since, when she urges the more easily intimidated readers to become more adventurous: ''That, dear, is called reading!'' she intones in her best Toni Morrison alto.
