This book is a great holiday read it will make you laugh very hard and give you some insight into “island culture”.

Don’t stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk

Here is the description from Amazon:

It’s every parrothead’s dream: to leave behind the rat race of the workaday world and start life all over again amidst the cool breezes, sun-drenched colors, and rum-laced drinks of a tropical paradise. It’s the story of Norman Paperman, a New York City press agent who, facing the onset of middle age, runs away to a Caribbean island to reinvent himself as a hotel keeper. (Hilarity and disaster — of a sort peculiar to the tropics — ensue.) It’s the novel in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such acclaimed and bestselling novels as The Caine Mutiny and War and Remembrance draws on his own experience (Wouk and his family lived for seven years on an island in the sun) to tell a story at once brilliantly comic and deeply moving.

While the location is said to be purely fictional it is believed that Royal Mail Inn on Hassel Island (Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas) was the real-life setting of the book.

More great St. John holiday reads can be found here.