Happy 2024! I can now say I read or rated all of Oprah’s book club picks from 2023 — I read half of them: The Covenant of Water and Bittersweet. While Bittersweet made some good points, it didn’t stick with me. I doubt I would have read Abraham Verghese’s Covenant if I had not read his first book, My Own Country, when it came out about 30 years ago. I found that to be an excellent and beautifully written memoir. So I dove in to the 775 pages of Covenant and soaked it all up.
There’s something to be said that only one of these four picks are rated high; the others are moderate. I appreciate that. I am sure Oprah didn’t do that deliberately, given that the previous year’s are mostly rated high. But this is a generally good batch when it terms to content (relatively speaking when it comes to celebrity book clubs…).
Here are the four books, with authors and ratings. The first three are novels, and the last is nonfiction.
Wellness, Nathan Hill — High
The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese — Moderate
Hello Beautiful, Ann Napolitano — Moderate
Bittersweet, Susan Cain — Moderate
