The Pocono Book Club

This novel caught the eye of many readers and stayed with them well after enjoying it over the three years since the book's been published. Our book club likes a good psychological suspense story, and this one is said to fit the bill nicely and in a more unique way. What that way is, well, we'll just have to dig in and talk about it, won't we?! A thrill of a read for your October awaits!

From Goodreads:

Travis Wren has an unusual talent for locating missing people. Hired by families as a last resort, he requires only a single object to find the person who has vanished. When he takes on the case of Maggie St. James—a well-known author of dark, macabre children’s books—he’s led to a place many believed to be only a legend.

Called "Pastoral," this reclusive community was founded in the 1970s by like-minded people searching for a simpler way of life. By all accounts, the commune shouldn’t exist anymore and soon after Travis stumbles upon it… he disappears. Just like Maggie St. James.

Years later, Theo, a lifelong member of Pastoral, discovers Travis’s abandoned truck beyond the border of the community. No one is allowed in or out, not when there’s a risk of bringing a disease—rot—into Pastoral. Unraveling the mystery of what happened reveals secrets that Theo, his wife, Calla, and her sister, Bee, keep from one another. Secrets that prove their perfect, isolated world isn’t as safe as they believed—and that darkness takes many forms.

Hauntingly beautiful, hypnotic, and bewitching, A History of Wild Places is a story about fairy tales, our fear of the dark, and losing yourself within the wilderness of your mind.

We're wrapping up our 2024 with a 1934 perpetual bestseller! Pennsylvania, Christmastime, and a resonating observation of American life, all wrapped up in one. After traveling down through the decades to us, does this slimmer novel hold gravitas with our group today?

May the conversation ensue around a table filled with good friends, good food, and good drink! Happy Holidays, everybody!

From Goodreads:

The writer whom Fran Lebowitz compared to the author of The Great Gatsby, calling him “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

One of the great novels of small-town American life, Appointment in Samarra is John O’Hara’s crowning achievement.

O’Hara did for fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi: surveyed its social life and drew its psychic outlines, but he did it in utterly worldly terms, without Faulkner’s taste for mythic inference or the basso profundo of his prose. Julian English is a man who squanders what fate gave him. He lives on the right side of the tracks, with a country club membership, and a wife who loves him. His decline and fall, over the course of just 72 hours around Christmas, is a matter of too much spending, too much liquor, and a couple of reckless gestures. That his calamity is petty and preventable only makes it more powerful. In Faulkner, the tragedies all seem to be taking place on Olympus, even when they’re happening among the low-lifes. In O’Hara, they could be happening to you.

Brimming with wealth and privilege, jealousy and infidelity, O’Hara’s iconic first novel is an unflinching look at the dark side of the American dream—and a lasting testament to the keen social intelligence of a major American writer.

With the Holiday Season in full swing, we will be having our 9th annual Holiday Book Grab Bag to stay in tune with holiday spirits! This is our most popular event of the year!

Here's how it works:

1. Select a work of fiction or narrative non-fiction that is under 500 pages that has really meant a lot to you. New or used, it's all good, just as long as we haven't previously read it for the book club and it's in good shape.
2. Wrap the book like a Christmas present and bring it with you to our meeting.
3. We'll put all the wrapped books into a big bag.
4. We'll draw lots to see in what order we pick a book; whoever picks 1 will go first and on down the numeric line.
5. Everyone unwraps their picks at the same time and chaos ensues, lol, j/k! If you want to swap the book you pulled out (for example, you own it or have already read it), then feel free to.
6. It's yours now, you won it! Read it and bring your present back to our January meeting to give us your thoughts :-).

This is always a fun time! See you there!!!