The first good guess I received at to which book Oprah Winfrey will pick for her book club on October 5 was Dave Eggers‘s What Is the What?, especially since it was already due to come out in a Vintage paperback the following Tuesday. It wasn’t a perfect choice—the list price is $15.95, a dollar more than that for Oprah’s mystery pick—but it was a pretty good one…was, until Local LIT editor Kathye Fetsko Petrie pointed out that a page count had been added to the mystery book’s Amazon.com listing, and on that basis, along with the previously establsihed criteria, she predicted it would be Gabriel Garcia Marquez‘s Love in the Time of Cholera. If true, that should make for an interesting opening weekend when Mike Newell‘s film version is released in mid-November. (And wouldn’t that be right around the time Garcia Marquez would be expected to make his appearance on the show?)
Another reader had suggested that it might be Elizabeth Gilbert‘s Eat, Pray, Love, but an inspection of the Oprah website makes it clear that’s what will be discussed before the big reveal, and anyway it’s a Penguin paperback. Another reader thinks it might be one of Philip Roth‘s Zuckerman novels—on Bizarro World Oprah, maybe—and I got into a mini-debate with slunch over Fire in the Blood, which has barely come out in hardcover.