A handful of books make the Pokhara region come alive on the page.
Annapurna by Maurice Herzog is the original — the French climber's 1950 account of the first ascent of any 8,000-metre peak, written in hospital with bandaged stumps where his frostbitten fingers had been. The book that started Himalayan climbing as a global enterprise; it is dated in places and the politics around the climb have been heavily revised since, but the writing is still extraordinary.
Annapurna: A Woman's Place by Arlene Blum is the counterpoint — Blum led the first all-women ascent of Annapurna I in 1978, an expedition that included two deaths. The book is honest about expedition politics, gender on a high mountain, and grief.
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen covers a 1973 trek up the Kali Gandaki valley north of Pokhara, in search of George Schaller's blue sheep and (vainly) the snow leopard itself. It is partly a travel book, partly a memoir about the death of Matthiessen's wife, and partly an exposition of Zen Buddhism; it is also one of the great travel-writing books of the twentieth century.
Forget Kathmandu by Manjushree Thapa is more recent and broader — a Nepali writer's account of the country's politics in the years before and during the Maoist civil war. Useful for context if you stay long enough to understand more than the trekking circuit.