The smartest kid in my grad program wanted to write his first critical theory paper on the commodification and subsequent devaluing of literature using Oprah’s book club as the focal point.I knocked him around for this, with many snide asides about intellectual elitism, and encouraged him to look at NWA and Public Enemy as a better outlet for his Marxist critique.

Now, nobody needs to get Oprah’s back. She could hire a hit on me with the change in her seat cushions. And that wasn’t at all what it was about. I took him to task because the extension of the postmodern moment, the realization that art does not contain meaning but makes meaning in concert with audience, is that meaning is made both in conversation with and about a work.

(Maybe such distinctions only tickle me, a postmodern filtered Formalist.)

Whatever other critique you want to level at Oprah, her book club has meant more readers of serious works, and to me that is an absolute value. I look forward to being punched in the face by Jonathan Franzen when I one day try to rope him into this argument at a bar.

Regardless, it’s time for me to walk my talk, because a book that has arrived in my library queue at inopportune moments, was once purchased for me and then lost in the mail, a book I’ve flirted with for three years, is Oprah’s next - Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides’ tale of Calliope Stephanides and more precisely of the gene that turned Calliope into a hermaphrodite.

Perhaps the payment for my sin of waiting so long to read it will be to watch it mauled by two million red state housewives. Perhaps I’ll be vindicated and enriched by the breadth of conversation. But 100 pages in and this book totally has me. Does it matter that Oprah was my tipping point?