Hillel Italie reports that Oprah Winfrey's made another book club selection, and this time she's going big: Ken Follett's 1989 pageturner The Pillars of the Earth. At 973 pages, I'm pretty sure it's her longest book club selection ever. (What's the competition, besides I Know This Much Is True? I can't remember.)

It's been less than six weeks since she recommended Love in the Time of Cholera, though, and there seems to have been little advance notice that this new selection was even in the works. Possibly because GalleyCat readers had gotten awfully good at pinning down what the books were going to be at least a week before the official unveiling. (I've since been informed that Oprah did in fact alert people a while back, but as the book club picks come closer together, the media has stopped making such a fuss over them.)