Photo credit: Celestine Chua via Foter.com / CC BY
I’ve never been an Oprah fan, but Book Riot challenged me to listen to an Audie Award winner this year and I had already listened to Yes Please! (last year, although I just published the review earlier this year) so I was on the hunt for another winner that might appeal to me. I still prefer reading fiction to listening to it and I’m limited by what the Overdrive app has to offer, since it’s rare that I’ll pay for an audiobook. The answer was Oprah’s book.
I was surprised by how much I liked it. I think it can be easy (at least for me) to write Oprah off as one of the elite. Someone who has so much money it’s ridiculous, and is therefore unable to relate to the rest of us “common folk.” It’s easy to forget that she came from nothing and really has worked her butt of to get where she is, not to mention the ground she’s broken for both women and African Americans.
She took the title of the book from a question someone once asked her after she had finished interviewing him. He wanted to know what she knew for sure about herself and life in general. She was totally unprepared for the question at the time, but it stuck with her to the point where she made it the title of the essay she contributed to each issue of her magazine.
This book reminded me that, at the end of the day, Oprah really is just one of us. I knew I could relate to her from the very beginning when she said everything she does, all day every day, she does just so she can curl up next to the fire with a book in her lap at the end of it all. From there, Oprah went on to talk about everything from friendship to food to romantic love (both good and bad) to sexual abuse to her fear of flying over the ocean.
This book could probably be shelved in the self help section, since it seems like Oprah’s goal is to remind both herself and us what is most likely to bring us joy and self fulfillment (hint: it’s not money). She made some good points and I agreed with most of what she had to say, but by the time I got to the end I felt like I was getting diabetes from all the sweetness loaded into that one book. I mean, yes, it’s important to put positive energy out into the world, but let’s face it: plenty of people have loads of positive energy with nothing to show for it.
Fortunately, the book isn’t very long, so it ended shortly after it started making me want to gag.
What did you guys read/listen to this week? Anything that was too sweet for you? I want to hear all about it!