Welcome to Book + Bottle’s Fiction Book Club! We get together with a diverse group of folks to read great books and talk about them over glasses of wine. We started with an online Facebook group so we could connect before the store opened, and now that the store is open, we’re meeting and talking in person! And it’s just lovely. I love watching members gather and become friends after just one meeting. We have members who have never been in a book club before and members who are in three other book clubs! All are welcome.
Schedule
We meet on the last Thursday of each month in the store from 6 - 7:30PM. We do announcements and intros, grab drinks, and get settled from 6 - 6:30 PM, then discussion runs promptly from 6:30-7:30. The store is open till 9PM so you can continue the conversation with your new friends!
The fiction book club is very popular and gets extremely crowded. Please arrive as early as possible to snag a seat, knowing that we may run out of space in our little shop.
This month discussing: Fantasticland by Mike Bockoven
A modern take on Lord of the Flies meets Battle Royale that probes the consequences of a social civilization built online.
Since the 1970s, FantasticLand has been the theme park where “Fun is Guaranteed!” But when a hurricane ravages the Florida coast and isolates the park, the employees find it anything but fun. Five weeks later, the authorities who rescue the survivors encounter a scene of horror. Photos soon emerge online of heads on spikes outside of rides and viscera and human bones littering the gift shops, breaking records for hits, views, likes, clicks, and shares. How could a group of survivors, mostly teenagers, commit such terrible acts?
Presented as a fact-finding investigation and a series of first-person interviews, FantasticLand pieces together the grisly series of events. Park policy was that the mostly college-aged employees surrender their electronic devices to preserve the authenticity of the FantasticLand experience. Cut off from the world and left on their own, the teenagers soon form rival tribes who viciously compete for food, medicine, social dominance, and even human flesh. This new social network divides the ravaged dreamland into territories ruled by the Pirates, the ShopGirls, the Freaks, and the Mole People. If meticulously curated online personas can replace private identities, what takes over when those constructs are lost?