The Pocono Book Club

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!!!

**Important note! If we're snowed in, we'll have this meeting on Zoom and I'll email you the invitation.**

This particular gathering, our 9th annual, will be different from our other meetings: Instead of everyone reading and discussing one title, we'll each be reading and discussing our own book with the group!

Whichever book you won at our December Holiday Book Grab-Bag is the one you'll bring to this meeting. Let us know what you thought of it! We'll each take a turn to talk about our book and see what conversation ensues. With your giver having read the book, at least two people will be able to provide insights!

This is a great opportunity to start compiling a TBR (To Be Read) list for the new year if you're looking for other books to read outside of book club!

This 2014 psychological suspense book was adapted by Netflix in 2018 into a popular 5-season tv series. The debut novel stood out among the sub-genre for its realism and plot, accumulating accolades by everyone from the esteemed National Book Critics Circle to Stephen King. It was so successful that the author has published three best-selling sequels, with the reading public clamoring for more. Shall we see what all the praise is about?! Strap in for a taut reading ride!

Just a quick note: To prepare you if this bothers you, there's quite a bit of crass language.

From Goodreads:

When a beautiful, aspiring writer strides into the East Village bookstore where Joe Goldberg works, he does what anyone would do: he Googles the name on her credit card.

There is only one Guinevere Beck in New York City. She has a public Facebook account and Tweets incessantly, telling Joe everything he needs to know: she is simply Beck to her friends, she went to Brown University, she lives on Bank Street, and she’ll be at a bar in Brooklyn tonight—the perfect place for a “chance” meeting.

As Joe invisibly and obsessively takes control of Beck’s life, he orchestrates a series of events to ensure Beck finds herself in his waiting arms. Moving from stalker to boyfriend, Joe transforms himself into Beck’s perfect man, all while quietly removing the obstacles that stand in their way—even if it means murder.

A terrifying exploration of how vulnerable we all are to stalking and manipulation.