Mornea, This is what I’ve been trying to say for five pages. I don’t like Oprah. You do. I don’t know why you do, but you do.
And I’m not trying to portray stay at home moms as brainwashed idiots, I’m portraying them as…well, stay at home moms who can watch a t.v. show at 9:00 am. I can not. Because I am at work.
That’s all I said.
jar
Geez, people are angry in that thread!
Personaly I tried to read Paradise by Toni Morrison… started it twice and never went further than 60 pages or so, because I don’t understand a freaking word to the story…
I’ll stick with Harry Potter and Agatha Kristie!!! 
Thanks for the tip, Jodi. Maybe I’ll just mail it to Jarbaby. 
For the record, I’m not a big Oprah fan - my mom was. I don’t like watching people cry and get all touchy-feely on national television. Heck, not even when it’s faked in a movie. But even though I don’t like it - and I do recognize the influence she has in some segments of the population - I don’t find fault with her. I find fault with the people who will blindly follow anyone. Not to equate the two - but I don’t villify God because some of his followers are idiots.
As I stated earlier, just because someone is home at 9 am does not mean that they don’t work. It doesn’t show anything significant about them except that they are home at 9 in the morning. And remember, not all markets broadcast the show at the same time. Your comment about Oprah viewers being unemployed stay-at-home moms is completely irrelevant and I found it to be condescending.
Well I’m sorry for that mornea. I don’t mean to sound that way. And for the record, I think stay at home moms are the greatest. My mom was one, and I hope to be one, if I can ever convince my husband to fertilize an egg. 
Let me break it down, sans invective, sans swearing, sans creative spewing of hate, and then leave this god damn thread.
I don’t like Oprah at all. Watching her show makes me roll my eyes CONSISTENTLY. I’d rather watch PRESS YOUR LUCK than sit through an hour of Oprah. And I don’t like her for the same reasons I don’t like the leader of the Heaven’s Gate Cult. She has convinced her viewers that she is an authority on everything, when I doubt very much that she is.
that is all.
jarbabyj
Oh, good God. This is turning into the Thread of Really Bad Comparisons. Oprah has upset you because your mother takes her advice over yours and has a couple of women asking your husband for the latest Oprah book. So now she’s just like a fucking cult leader who convinced people to commit suicide?
Let’s dial it down a little bit, folks. Many people are on record liking Oprah. Fine. Many are on record disliking Oprah. Fine. Everybody is entitled to their opinions and I wouldn’t dream of telling somebody that their opinions on what constitutes good entertainment are wrong. While a personal dislike is subjective and generally not open to debate, comparisons between talk show hosts and suicidal cult leaders or genocidal dictators are objectively ridiculous.
Jarbabyj, your comments take a tone of “my opinion is valid and so is yours so let’s not debate”, but then you feel compelled to slip in a cult leader reference. I’m fine with you not liking Oprah. But I’m not fine with you making ridiculous statements comparing her to a cult leader.
I strongly object to this statement. I daresay that some people who are fans of Oprah don’t think she is an authority on everything. It is extremely ignorant of you to continually make such blanket statements when others have consistently pointed out the error of such statements.
It really bothers me when a group of people are painted with a wide brush. I don’t like gross generalizations of a group of people based on one similar characteristic.
*Not all Oprah fans are unemployed.
*Not all Oprah fans participate in her book club.
*Not all Oprah fans are mothers.
*Not all Oprah fans are white women.
*Not all Oprah fans are middle-class.
*Not all Oprah fans contribute to the Angel Network.
It is incredibly insulting to her fans to imply that none of them think for themselves when evaluating statements made by Oprah. I don’t give a damn about your personal feelings towards Oprah, but I cannot abide you insulting millions of people just because you don’t like someone that they do.
Preach it, sister.
Oprah comes on at 4pm EST here, too. And you know what? My mom works 40 hours a week, from 7am - 3:30pm. So she watches Oprah. It’s always on when I get back from school.
If I lived in Chicago, and Oprah came on at 9am, I would be able to watch it 3 days a week. I work 30 hours a week and attend school full-time.
I must be a lazy, brain-dead housewife in a velour sweatsuit. I also must be incredibly sheep-like and barely capable of not joining a suicide cult.
You’re so right, jarbaby.
So she’s not “one of us”? She spent her early life being abused by her parents, but she’s not “one of us”? She was a journalist in Baltimore, of all places, for several years, solidly middle-class and decidely un-famous, but she’s not “one of us”? “One of us” is not allowed to finally make a lot of money, take a nice vacation, and have people value our opinion?
You’re so right, jarbaby.
I want you to try really, really hard to type the following statement:
“I don’t like Oprah. That’s my personal opinion. I will not make hurtful, ignorant generalizations about the people who DO like her.”
I know you’re a writer, so it probably won’t be too hard. The above sentence is an example of expressing an opinion without insulting others who have a different opinion.
Jarbaby, it’s time you sat down with your Mom and discussed how much her lack of regard for your opinions has hurt your feelings. You apparently view your Mom as a brainwashed automaton incapable of forming an independent thought or exercising free will – a feeling you probably wouldn’t have if she blindly worshipped your opinions instead of Oprah’s – and you have repeatedly (and unfairly) tarred millions of Oprah viewers/readers with the same brush.
It apparently wasn’t enough for Jonathan Franzen to heap scorn on the “Oprah’s Book Club” endorsement of his book “The Corrections”. After reading from his book at the “KGB” bar the host proposed a Q&A – Franzen sniffed, “It’s so chain bookstore to do a Q&A”. What a snobbish, short-sighted ass – is he trying to turn people off?
Maybe he should have simply photocopied his precious book and handed it out to those mortals he deemed worthy. Entertainment Weekly has an editorial about his elitist behaviour.
Rock on, jarbabyj, Guinastasia, Sublight!
I hate Oprah too.
But by this I do not really mean Oprah the person. She has a slightly smug attitude sometimes, but I don’t think she’s evil impersonified and she even seems kind of sweet occasionally.
I mean Oprah the phenomenon.
I apologize for hurting anyone’s feelings on this board.
I apologize for putting forth the impression that only houseweives watch Oprah.
I apologize for berating the Book Club
It is My Opinion that Oprah is annoying, cloying and phony. That is only my opinion.
can we PLEASE close this thread? I beg you.
jar
It appears you have managed to articulate what everyone else around has struggled for days without success to articulate.
Kudos.
stoid
I do not watch Oprah’s talk show.
I find her magazine preachy and annoying.
I do not like Oprah Winfrey, not one bit.
For me, most picks of Oprah’s bookcabal are running in the category of "things i would not EVER read, unless my brain had shrunk into nothingness.
I’m really not trying to be antagonistic (or bitchy or whatever) when I ask this: but if the Prince is a book that “everyone should know”, why haven’t you read it? You say you’re upset that Oprah doesn’t recommend the “classics”, but you haven’t even read it… it doesn’t make sense. (and yes I’ve read your apology, but I came late to the thread.)
I liked what little DeSade I read … I have Justine, but it’s packed away in storage so I haven’t been able to finish it :(. I loved the Story of O and I would recommend it … to certain people… the same people I’d recommend Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty series too.
Personally, I don’t care for Oprah, I don’t watch her show, and I don’t read the books on her book list, but only because I don’t think I’d share her tastes. If my best friend said that she read a book on the list and loved it, I’d read it because she and I have very similar tastes, I wouldn’t discount it because Oprah recommended it first.
I love to spend HOURS browsing in bookstores reading the back of countless books, breathing in the scent of paper and glue, hearing the quiet rustling of pages being turned. But I also will read things that people recommend to me, family, friends, and strangers. If I see someone reading when I’m out and about I’ll try to see what they are reading, and even ask them about it (people hate me, I’m sure).
I, too, wish more people would read just for the sake of reading. I love to read, it’s my passion, my drug, my sanity and I don’t fully understand people that don’t like to read. I’ll read everything from Shakespeare to Bertrice Small (romance novelist). I think that anything that gets them into the store/library and reading is a Good Thing. It’s a first step.
When I worked at a bookstore, I was quite passionate about my book recommendations. I personally kept our store sold out on Outlander. I was able to sell it to people who claimed to hate romance novels (which it shouldn’t be shelved under, but that’s a different rant) … they would, 8 out of 10 times come back and pick up the sequels.
I guess what I’m getting at is that don’t think there’s anything wrong with the book club if it exposes people to books. Any book is better than no book, in my eyes.
Oh, give me a motherfucking break.
Every single person in this thread who has denigrated, insulted, and ridiculed people who read Oprah books (whether you apologized or not) is hearby invited to kiss my fucking ass. It must be hard to walk around thinking you’re so superior to everyone because of your choice in books. It must be difficult to deal with all the millions of idiots who aren’t as perfect as you, who don’t have your flawless taste in literature. Your misconceptions and inability to disagree with someone without insulting them makes me want to vomit. I hope to god that if I ever go around declaring myself better than everyone else over something as arbitrary as book preference, someone will smack me upside the head.
You truly make me sick. I have never in my life been so disgusted by a group of self-aggrandizing, self-important, egotistical fuckheads.
After I finish this post, I have to finish up a ten-page research paper on Wordsworth’s relationship with his sister Dorothy and how it affected his writing. I had to read all of her journals side by side with his poetry, over two hundred pages of writing total. Then I have to re-read “The Wasteland” by Eliot and continue work on a paper about the classical stories and myths referenced by Sherwood Anderson in “Winesburg, Ohio” that’s due in two weeks.
It’s going to be a lot harder than I thought to maintain by 3.8 GPA considering that my brain has diminished to “nothingness” based on what I read in my free time.
I hope I’m nothing like any of you when I finish college. I hope I don’t walk around thinking I’m automatically better than everyone because of something so personal and subjective.
You all are absolutely repulsive to me.
Sara, I don’t think you should hold back, just go right ahead, tell us what you * really * think…no, don’t candycoat it, we can take it!
[sub]rah![/sub]
What Nacho4Sara said goes double for me.
In my thread in Cafe Society, I asked why some people feel a need to put down her books. I just don’t get this attitude of superiority when it comes to the choices in her book club. In a different thread that I referenced, someone mentions that the SDMBers have “more discerning tastes than Oprah…” WTF? I don’t have “discerning taste” because I happen to like the books she recommends?
I do read other stuff; biographies, random books I find on my own, recommendations from friends, and even, (the horror!) books on the best-seller list.
How can you just dismiss all the Oprah books without having read them?
What the hell is wrong with liking the book club books? If they’re not your cup of tea, fine. As I mentioned before, SF/F is not my cup of tea. I don’t like it. I don’t read it. And I know it puts me in a definite minority on this board. I would never start a thread about how anyone who reads SF/F is a mindless idiot.
Funny, I’d rather read a good book than sit through an hour of Oprah. 