Can You Guess the Next Oprah Book Pick?

According to this squib in the New York Times (fourth item down), the newest selection in Oprah Winfrey’s book club will be announced on Wednesday, March 28.

Here is the book’s page on Amazon.com, which says that the book is published by Vintage Books (one of Random House’s paperback imprints) and is 304 pages long (although the page counts listed on Amazon are often incorrect).

B&N.com, meanwhile, says the forthcoming selection is a Knopf book, but I am guessing that is not quite right: Knopf is a hardcover imprint, also within the Random House empire, although it is worth noting that most of Knopf’s books are later published in paperback by Vintage. So, using the B&N.com listing of Knopf as a clue, it seems sensible that the book under discussion was published in hardcover by Knopf and in paperback by Vintage.

Oprah used to pick novels; but since she revived her book club, she has been partial to memoirs including Elie Wiesel’s Night and Sidney Poitier’s The Measure of a Man. And this was after getting burned by the James Frey/A Million Little Pieces mess.

And so, dear readers, what do you think is Oprah’s next pick? Will she stick with the memoir? Will she honor an eminence grise like Poitier and Wiesel, or will she champion a younger writer?

My money is on Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. It’s a wonderful book (published by Knopf/Vintage) and I am guessing that Winfrey’s loyal readers would appreciate Didion’s clear-eyed chronicle of death and life and sorrow.

The first blog commenter with the correct guess wins a Freakonomics t-shirt or autographed book, your choice. If others later guess correctly, we’ll select one of those people randomly to receive the same prize. (We try not to punish people in the wrong time zones.) I would say that you are ineligible to guess if you have actual inside information about the new book pick, but I assume the lure of a t-shirt isn’t enough to overcome the sanction you’d receive from your boss for divulging the information.