A Toronto writer has received the seal of approval from the world's most influential reader.

Hal Niedzviecki's The Peep Diaries is on Oprah's list of "25 Books You Can't Put Down."

The summer reading list appears in the July edition of O magazine and on the talk-show host's website.

Niedzviecki's book The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbours examines the new culture being created by twitter, blogs and other social media.

In it, he argues that we are changing the definition of privacy and renegotiating values we once took for granted with these new forms of electronic media.

Cathleen Medwick describes the book on Oprah's site: "'You need to know. You need to be known.' That is the compulsion fueling what cultural critic Hal Niedzviecki calls 'peep culture, the bastard love child of gossip' — our mass addiction to twittering, tweeting, snooping, spying, blogging, gawking at reality TV and YouTube, spilling our secrets on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Ping… the list goes on."

Oprah's list of 25 books includes choices such as the memoir Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith's reimagining of the Jane Austen novel as zombie fiction, and the novel Heroic Measures by Jill Ciment.

Niedzviecki is a cultural critic, novelist and editor and co-founder of the magazine Broken Pencil .

Raised in Ottawa, he hosted a summer replacement series, Subcultures, on CBC Radio One and is creating a documentary film called Peep Me.