Many years ago I had all but stopped reading on a regular basis. I really can’t tell you why…maybe just life got in the way, or I let it. Anyway, what got me started reading again was when Oprah came out with her monthly book club picks. I read so many great books, and to be honest…several that just weren’t my cup of tea, but the important thing was that I was reading again on a very regular basis. I kept up with the book club choices for a long time, but then I just started picking up books on my own again. Once in a while I still look at something Oprah recommends, and I thought I might pass them along to you.
The Newest Oprah Book Club 2016 Selection
From prize-winning, bestselling author Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hellish for all slaves, but Cora is an outcast even among her fellow Africans, and she is coming into womanhood; even greater pain awaits. Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her of the Underground Railroad and they plot their escape.
Like Gulliver, Cora encounters different worlds on each leg of her journey…Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors of black life in pre-Civil War America. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage, and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.