The Reader
By Bernhard Schlink
Oprah Book Club® Selection #24, February 1999
Editorial Review:
Originally published in Switzerland, and gracefully translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway, The Reader is a brief tale about sex, love, reading, and shame in postwar Germany. Michael Berg is 15 when he begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. He never learns very much about her, and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany’s Nazi past, and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: What should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? “We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable…. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?” Continue reading »
out the calculator – click start, then run, type calc, ok – I love this thing) approximately 24 more days. Maybe even longer if I can’t manage to post two books a day. And if I do that, it means that I won’t be posting anything else but Oprah’s Book Club Selections for the next month. Last count, I think there were 67 selections, with the last one including two books. I’ve posted 20 Book Club Selections, so far, leaving 47 to go.
book club on The Oprah Winfrey Show. I was maintaining a list of the book collection and even posted some of them on an old website. Somewhere along the way, I left it behind. 
dramatically. It just shows you how much influence Oprah had on the reading public. A couple of her selections caused much controversy, such as The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and James Frey’s memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Read more at 
