Oprah’s Book Club Discovers Some Guy Named Charles Dickens

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Jonathan Franzen appears with Oprah Winfrey

Harpo Productions

It was the best of book clubs. It was the worst of book clubs.

Oprah Winfrey has decided to choose a pair of Charles Dickens classics, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations for her book club. What’s more, they’ve been released in a Penguin paperback edition, which amounts to around 800 pages and $20 (though the e-version is selling for a criminally low $7.99).

(See TIME’s best books of last year.)

The reason for the varying value is that the all-important copyright long ago expired on these 19th-century novels — they didn’t even have Facebook or Twitter back then you know — which means that Great Expectations can even be downloaded for free on Amazon.com’s Kindle reader. Or if you can stretch to it, A Tale of Two Cities costs 99 cents on Barnes & Noble’s e-book device, the Nook.

But while the announcement is somewhat newsworthy, it pales into insignificance compared to Winfrey’s Monday show also including her interview with Jonathan Franzen. After the much-publicized fallout over her selecting his 2001 masterpiece, The Corrections, and Frazen subsequently wanting nothing to do with the accolade, the pair have had an awkward history.

(See what’s on Franzen’s bookshelf.)

If you’re expecting more of the same, you’ll be left disappointed. The interview is pre-taped and, according to Jeff Seroy, the senior VP of marketing and publicity at Farrar, Straus & Giroux (they publish Franzen), who was at the show, “They hugged before they went on,” he tells the New York Times. “They hugged at the beginning of the show, and they hugged at the end.” Three is indeed the magic number because the interview was divided into three portions: Franzen discussing his writing and work habits, taking questions from the audience and, wait for it, Franzen and Winfrey talking “at length about their shared history.”

Neatly for the purpose of this post, Franzen has previously written about Dickens’ era, when a new literary release “was anticipated with the kind of fever that a late-December film release inspires today.” Well Mr. Franzen, swap a literary release with Oprah’s couch and late-December with early and you’ve got yourself a pop-culture moment that could be talked about for at least some part of this week. (via AP)