Oprah throws the book at us.

Oprah Winfrey should be warned that dangerous things can happen when you form book clubs. The very American tradition of gathering together to discuss what you've been reading led to such revolutionary movements as women's suffrage and civil rights.

On second thought, maybe Oprah knows exactly what she's doing.

"We read to know we are not alone."

--C. S. Lewis in "Shadowlands"

Last September Oprah Winfrey, in a rather startling and upbeat move, announced that she was beginning an on-the-air book club and invited her huge television audience to rush out and pick up a copy of the club's first selection, Jacqueline Mitchard's The Deep End of the Ocean (Viking, 1996). Bookstores and libraries around the country were suddenly inundated with requests for Mitchard's novel, which promptly skyrocketed to the top of best-seller lists.

In an era when social and literary critics are warning us about the electronic age's negative impact on reading and literature, it seems both ironic and refreshing that the queen of talk TV should be urging millions of Americans to put down their channel changers and go read a book. Even nicer is the fact that Winfrey seems to have no ulterior motive in this project. Instead of hawking one of those huge "companion texts" we see advertised with each PBS special, Winfrey is recommending that we go out and buy somebody else's book. I haven't seen this sort of corporate generosity since the Macy's Santa sent customers over to Gimbel's in "Miracle on 34th Street."

At the same time, it should come as no surprise to anyone as smart as Winfrey that her largely female television audience would respond very well to the suggestion of a book club, and not just because women read about 70 percent of the fiction published every year in America. Book clubs, or reading groups as they are also known, have experienced a renaissance in the past few years. Indeed, these groups have become a significant source of revenue for both independent and chain stores, which explains why so many bookstores actively support local reading groups by sponsoring events, offering discounts, and even sending out regular mailings. After all, these are customers who are guaranteed to need at least 12 books a year. And although there are a growing number of both men's and mixed reading groups popping up, the majority of book clubs around the country continue to be exclusively female.

Still, reading groups are hardly a new phenomenon in this country. David Laskin and Holly Hughes argue in The Reading Group Book (Plume, 1995) that the Puritan religious leader Anne Hutchinson may have started America's first literary discussion group while on board a ship bound for the Massachusetts Bay Colony back in 1634. Hutchinson, who had invited a group of her female shipboard companions to meet to discuss the weekly sermon, continued this practice in Boston until the local establishment informed the women that such gatherings were "condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex."

For the next two centuries the successors of Hutchinson's group were mostly church-sponsored sewing and reading circles known as "mite" or "cent" societies, in which members contributed a penny a week for the purchase of Bibles or religious tracts, which they then read and discussed often under the supervision of male clergy. But not all groups were so tame. In Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History (University of Illinois Press, 1991), Anne Firor Scott reports that the free black women who formed the Female Literary Association of Philadelphia in 1831 "not only pioneered in self-help literary associations, but also worked diligently to create and support schools for black people."

It was this hunger for knowledge and education that lay behind much of the explosive growth of women's reading and study groups in the half century following the Civil War. In what is described as possibly the first mass movement in American history, women's reading groups sprang up from Boston to California.

With far too few colleges or universities open to their sex (or race), thousands of these hungry minds turned to reading and study groups to discuss and present papers on literature, art, science, and politics. Although often ridiculed as silly and inconsequential, in time such groups proved to be the training ground for a generation of women who sent their daughters off to college and into the ranks of the suffrage movement.

Janice Steinschneider argues in An Improved Woman (Carlson, 1994) that the study clubs of the late 1800s soon shifted from a focus on self-improvement and education to public service and political action. Women who had honed their minds and voices in parlors moved out into the public arena and demanded attention, respect, and social change. The Puritan fathers, it would seem, were right to fear Anne Hutchinson's unsupervised sermon club. Very dangerous things can happen when people get together to read.

If women's study clubs are one of the predecessors of our modern reading group, the other is the Great Books movement, which blossomed in the decades after World War II. In 1929 Robert M. Hutchins, the newly appointed president of the University of Chicago, introduced a concept based on a humanities course John Erskine had previously taught to juniors and seniors at New York's Columbia University. Along with his colleague Mortimer J. Adler, Hutchins taught a seminar course using classic texts of Western literature and philosophy.

In time this wildly popular concept was taken outside the university and made available to various adult groups. Indeed, as Laskin and Hughes point out, one of the earliest successes Adler and Hutchins enjoyed with their Great Books program involved the so-called "Fat Man Group," an association of well-to-do Chicago businessmen committed to continuing self-education. By the end of the '50s there were 50,000 registered participants in what one critic described as "the most ambitious program of adult education ever."

In the '60s and '70s a number of factors contributed to the decline of the Great Books movement. Many more people were going to college, and so there was less of a demand for extracurricular reading of the classics. On top of that, the civil rights and women's movements made many uneasy with an educational program based almost exclusively upon the musings of dead white males. Still, 40 years after its peak, the Great Books Foundation continues to flourish--reporting a membership of about 20,000 adults participating in 1,800 groups around the country.

Although there have been many reasons why people joined the Great Books movement, most seem to have been interested in knowledge and intelligent conversation. People reported that they wanted to expand their intellectual and cultural horizons and to make connections with interesting conversational partners.

In many ways those reasons are not so different from the motives behind the current resurgence of reading groups. In both Ellen Slezak's The Book Group Book (Chicago Review Press, 1995) and Rachel Jacobsohn's The Reading Group Handbook (Hyperion, 1994), members of contemporary reading groups speak about joining book clubs to get themselves to read interesting books and find a group of like-minded folks with whom they might socialize and discuss stimulating ideas.

What does seem different, however, are goals. While the members of women's study clubs and participants in the Great Books groups of the '40s and '50s were largely interested in self-improvement through education, it would seem that many contemporary members are drawn more by the social nature of book clubs. In the midst of the electronic age and the increasing information glut that accompanies it, it's not knowledge that's a scarce commodity, it's the leisure of a good conversation. Sociologist Elizabeth Long points out that reading groups offer us the relatively rare opportunity to have a sustained conversation with a small group of acquaintances (and, eventually, friends) about things that really matter to us--morality, law, art, and relationships.

My own experience bears this out. Two years ago, newly arrived in town and busy settling into a new job, I was invited by a colleague to join a local book club. I accepted the invitation as much to meet new people as to read some interesting books. In the course of the first year, when asked how I liked belonging to such a group, I responded that I thought it was a good thing--though I was often plowing through the last couple of hundred pages of our monthly "assignment" on the morning of our Saturday night get-togethers. The process, I would tell myself, was sharpening my mind and expanding my (admittedly narrow) literary horizons.

Over the past two dozen months I have read about 20 books for our meetings, most of which I had never read before, and many of which I certainly would not have read without the reading group. Some were contemporary works, such as Ursula Hegi's Stones from the River, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, or William Trevor's Felicia's Journey. Others were modern classics: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Hermann Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund, and Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent. Just typing out some of these titles and glancing at the stack of paperbacks on my bookcase reminds me of how much I gained from reading these texts, even the ones I didn't enjoy.

But the deeper truth is that the reading group has made reading literature a social event for me, or at least allowed the solitude of reading a good book to blossom into a conversation--even a sort of communion--with other persons. Forty million folks have seen the latest film or TV show, and they all saw it recently, so you can walk into any place and connect or start a conversation, shallow as it may be. But pick up a serious book, spend 20 hours reading it, and where will you go to talk about all the things it stirred up in you?

In the past two years I have come to see our reading group not as a self-improvement class but a moveable feast. The group isn't just a series of pleasant dinners and animated discussions about our most recent book but a continuing conversation in which the connections and references we make to earlier readings and discussions are forming a latticework tying together the stories of our own lives. Indeed, as I sit down to read each new book, a growing part of the pleasure of reading comes from anticipating how John or Alexis might respond to a particular passage, or remembering a comment Scott or Debbie made about a similar text. Even in the act of reading I am not really alone.

In the end, I am discovering that the focus of our conversations is ultimately not about books we've read, or even the abstract notions we found in them, but about the place we are building together--a place between the stories we read and the lives we lead. To paraphrase a line from Carousel, the books we read were great, but the company was sublime.