OPRAH CALLING:Felecia Wintons, owner of Books for Thought bookstore in Tampa, has been Oprah-anointed. She is featured in this month's O: The Oprah Magazine under the headline "Hello, This Is Your Life Calling: Stories of Transformation." She and seven other women tell their stories of how they "got the message," took a risk in their lives and ended up happy.

Wintons had been a financial analyst for Citicorp for 10 years ("a dream job for a business school graduate like me"), but deep down she knew she had always wanted to work for herself. So she quit her job and opened the Tampa bookstore, which specializes in African-American books.

"This day it surprises me just how bold and fearless I was," she writes. "Perhaps my confidence came from the reading I did as a child growing up in Lake City, Florida, when I learned the power of books: They transported me to places I had never been and gave me a love of adventure."

In the same issue of talk show host Oprah Winfrey's monthly magazine, Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling lists her favorite books (Emma by Jane Austen and Cheri by Colette), favorite living writer (Irish novelist Roddy Doyle), favorite books as a child (The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge and The Story of the Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit) and favorite new children's book (Skelig by David Almond).

FUTURE BOOKS: In an interview in Newsweek special issue on the year 2001, now on magazine racks, 83-year-old Arthur C. Clarke (the author of 2001: Space Odyssey lives in Sri Lanka) jokingly blames HAL, the computer he created for the movie and novel, for Florida's confused results in the U.S. presidential elections. He also admits the title 2001 was director Stanley Kubrick's idea. Meanwhile, Steven Levy compares HAL to today's computers. (For more comparisons between then and now, see the article at left).

Also in the Newsweek special issue, Ray Sawhill provides a sneak preview of new books for the year 2001, from Jason Epstein's Book Business (see above), out this month, to Barbara Ehrenreich's account of living on the minimum wage, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in Boom-Time America, due out in May. Howard Sounes' Down the Highway, a biography of Bob Dylan, is also scheduled for May, just in time for the singer's 60th birthday in May. Other books on the horizon: David McCullough's biography of John Adams, Stephen Ambrose's The Wild Blue on the pilots who flew the B-24s and the next book by Michael (The New New Thing) Lewis appropriately entitled Next. It's about computers. And watch out for new novels by Jonathan Franzen, Alice Munro, Richard Russo, Larry McMurtry, Mario Vargas Llosa and Pat Barker as well as Amy Tan and Anne Tyler. The award for "Originality of Premise," says Sawhill, goes to Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone, due out in April from Houghton Mifflin. The author re-imagines Gone With the Wind from the point of view of its African-American characters.

WHY BOOKS SURVIVE: Novelist Larry McMurtry reviews Jason Epstein's Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future (Norton, $21.95) in this week's New Republic. Epstein's book, which began as a series of lectures at the New York Public Library, recounts the "splendors and miseries of American trade book publishing, past, present, and future." McMurtry cheers on Epstein -- who was the founder of Anchor Books, a stalwart at Random House and one of the founders of the New York Review of Books -- when he is waxing enthusiastically about the good old days when his writers would feel free to slip into his office and spend the night on the couch, "not always alone." He mourns along with Epstein when he describes the current vast and impersonal multinational business that publishing has become. But McMurtry ultimately takes Epstein to task for meekly accepting this state of affairs.

"If I were speaking about the state of book publishing at the New York Public Library," writes McMurtry, "I would come down like Nietzsche and cry disgrace. . . . A marketing culture doesn't need the surprise of literature and doesn't want it. It wants products -- the simpler and the less ambiguous, the better."

Briefly noted:

The Writer, created in Boston in 1887, has a new look -- and a new location. Based in Waukesha, Wis., the magazine still provides writers with practical advice, now with better graphics. This month's issue features tips from Wisconsin-based Jane Hamilton and National Book Award-winner Ha Jin as well as New Year's resolutions from published writers, including Miami's Tananarive Due and Judith Martin (better known as Miss Manners).

According to Nick Montfort, writing in the special section on Literature and Cyberspace in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers, the most widely read story ever presented on the Internet had no snazzy graphics, just pure text: The Starr Report. "Good reading is good reading, regardless of presentation," he concludes.

-- Margo Hammond is book editor for the Times.

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