Book Club
A collection of essential reads for Cape Ann enthusiasts. The following books include a mix of wonderful stories of local interest, as well as the genius work of local writers.
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The Maximus Poems
By Charles Olson
Read it because: Walking the waterfront of a city alone in the morning, watching fish landings, cash stuffed in pockets, net mendings, and halos of circling gulls, is almost as lost an experience as whaling. Olson is gritty, petulant Gloucester’s Walt Whitman.
Cape Ann Granite
By Paul St. Germain
Read it because: You don’t know a feather from a wedge, but you cannot help but wonder how men once moved tons of granite out of the Cape Ann earth and on to places like New York City with only oxen and sailing ships.
Decline of Fishes
By Peter Anastas
Read it because: Anastas was a local kid who went Ivy League and came home to become the moral epicenter of the city’s cultural life.
Down to the Sea: The Fishing Schooners of Gloucester
By Joseph E. Garland
Read it because: Schooners are not just pretty boats in paintings. They were deadly workhorses, turning around the economy of this city while simultaneously sending thousands of men to the bottom of the sea.
The Whole Song: Selected Poems
By Vincent Ferrini
Read it because: Vincent Ferrini was Charles Olson’s best friend.
Quick, Before the Music Stops: How Ballroom Dancing Saved My Life
By Janet Carlson
Read it because: The next best thing to dancing is laughing and Carlson uses both to navigate divorce.
Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man
By Mark Kurlansky
Read it because: That bag of frozen peas in your freezer has an origin story right here.
Twin Lights Tonic: Cape Ann’s Timeless Soda Pop
By Paul St. Germain & Devlin Sherlock
Read it because: Our favorite fizzy drink is as iconic here as that other one is to Atlanta.
The Perfect Storm
By Sebastian Junger
Read it because: This is the book that introduced George Clooney to Gloucester. He came to make the movie. He hung out in our waterfront bars and shot hoops with locals. Also, the book also has the best description in the English language of what happens when we drown.
The Boston Girl
By Anita Diamant
Read it because: The Rockport Lodge, where the story’s heroine vacations, was still open ten years ago as a place for single working women from Boston to have an affordable seaside vacation. In other words, there were places where until very recently work had dignity.
At the Cut
By Peter Anastas
Read it because: If you don’t know what The Cut is you don’t know Gloucester.
Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost town
By Elyssa East
Read it because: It’s one of the saddest corners of local history. This is a true crime story that unfolds in Dogtown, a wild place at the center of a city of 30,000 people.
Goneboy, A Walkabout: A Father’s Search for the Truth in His Son’s Murder
By Gregory Gibson
Read it because: The gun reform movement in America started here.
Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America’s First Poet
By Charlotte Gordon
Read it because: Much of this country’s political philosophy came from a young girl with a pen in Ipswich in the 17th century. The American Revolution dudes were quoting Anne Bradstreet to each other.
The North Shore Literary Trail
By Kristin Bierfelt
Read it because: This book maps the ideal North Shore journey for a reader.
Out of Line: A Life of Playing with Fire
By Barbara Lynch
Read it because: She runs many of the top restaurants in Boston and, frankly, the whole country. She appeared as a guest judge on a 2019 episode of Top Chef. (And because you might need to go next door and borrow a cup of sugar from her.)
Gloucester Along the Water
By Justin Demetri
Read it because: This is America’s oldest seaport. There is much to learn.
The Last Days of Dogtown
By Anita Diamant
Read it because: It’s a story of a real-life lost colony.
Flight Calls: Exploring Massachusetts through Birds
By John R. Nelson
Read it because: You might learn who is chirping, cawing, coo-ing, and calling in Cape Ann woods and waters.
Leaving Lucy Pear
By Anna Solomon
Read it because: You might bump into the award-winning author at Shaw’s, so you will want to let her know that you have read her second novel, too.
The Woman Who Named God: Abraham’s Dilemma and the Birth of the Three Faiths
By Charlotte Gordon
Read it because: We all have troubled families, more or less, but this troubled family is a cornerstone of biblical myth.
Adventure: Queen of the Windjammers
By Joseph E. Garland
Read it because: You don’t have to just read about it. You can sail on the Adventure, too. A sunset cruise through Gloucester Harbor beneath majestic sails is an unforgettable experience, and one that immediately explains what life was like when these ships ruled the seas.
Know Fish
By Vincent Ferrini
Read it because: Vincent Ferrini was Poet Laureate of Gloucester in 1998. He understands a fishing metaphor and a Gloucester poem.
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Woostonecraft & Mary Shelley
By Charlotte Gordon
Read it because: It is a story of a 19th century mother and daughter who each lived lives that wholly and intentionally embraced women’s intellectual equality, but the mother died giving birth to the daughter. The daughter never knew her mother. It’s adventurous. It’s romantic. It’s tragic. And it’s true.
A Circle Around Her
By Jonathan Strong
Read it because: The author recently retired as a Writing professor at Tufts University, where he held the record for the longest tenure of anyone in the English Department. His novels reflect an uncanny understanding of the smallest and grandest human experiences, which makes him the sparkling gentleman friend everyone wants at their dinner party in Rockport, where Strong lives for half the year.
Good Harbor
By Anita Diamant
Read it because: Wouldn’t it be cool to read a great beach novel on a beach about that beach.
Hammers on Stone: The History of Cape Ann Granite
By Barbara H. Erkkila
Read it because: The Army Corps of Engineers once consulted the author on how to replace the granite at the entrance to New York’s Lincoln Tunnel. Erkkila was a charming, petite woman who grew up skipping rocks on Plum Cove Beach, and became an award winning reporter for The Gloucester Times. Her passions were quarries and Harleys (as in the motorcycle).
Sandy Bay: National Harbor of Refuge and the Navy
By Paul St. Germain
Read it because: It’s hard to believe a story of national importance ever visited this little harbor, skittled these most summer days now by children’s dinghies.
Village at Lane’s Cove
By Barbara H. Erkkila
Read it because: Mark Twain would have envied the color and quality of a good Lanes Cove story.
Archaeologist of Morning
By Charles Olson
Read it because: It is the complete volume of Olson poems, and as a poet who stood 6’7’’, anything “complete” about him is bigger than other poets.
The Siege of Salt Cove
By Anthony Weller
Read it because: Award-winning, international writer and journalist Anthony Weller has written over 150 articles for National Geographic Traveler, The Paris Review, Forbes, GEO, The New York Times Magazine, G.Q., Conde-Nast Traveler, Gourmet, Harpers, Playboy, Vogue, Architectural Digest, Smithsonian, Pan, Delta-Sky, Esquire, Merian, Guitar Review, New York, Travel & Leisure, and many other magazines. Why wouldn’t you want to read his novel about Cape Ann, where he lived in his last years?
Call Me Ishmael: Herman Melville, Moby Dick, and America
By Charles Olson
Read it because: Gloucester writer Peter Anastas says it’s the best introduction to Melville—and what that iconic whale story meant.
Twin Lights of Thacher Island, Cape Ann
By Paul St. Germain
Read it because: These light houses—twins!—are probably the best French-designed objets Cape Ann decor offers.
No Fortunes
By Peter Anastas
Read it because: Gloucester-born Anastas understood this city’s fortunes.
The Mercy Seat
By Elizabeth H. Winthrop
Read it because: The author lives on the North Shore, but she is best known between the pages of the New York Times Review of Books. Johnny Cash wrote a song entitled “The Mercy Seat.” Nick Cave covered it. Winthrop’s story of a black man’s unjust execution takes this Old Testament piece of furniture for its name.
In Cod We Trust: From Sea to Shore, the Celebrated Cuisine of Coastal Massachusetts
By Heather Atwood
Read it because: This cookbook includes what Folly Cove Designer and Caldecott-award winning author Virginia Lee Burton made her children for dinner when she was busy creating. Some of the recipes in the book are delicious and some colorfully explain through food the diverse cultures of coastal Massachusetts.
When Gloucester Was Gloucester: Toward an Oral History of the City
By Peter Parsons & Peter Anastas
Read it because: Nostalgia always feels good.
Charles Olson: Letters Home, 1949-1969
Edited by David Rich
Read it because: It’s like being at a wooden table in an East Gloucester kitchen under yellow lamplight with Charles Olson and all his Gloucester friends sitting around speaking in jokey vernacular about poetry, fish, and who-did-what-last-week.
The Gloucester Notebook
By T.S. Eliot
Read it because: One of the most famous poets in the English language lived for a short time as a child in Gloucester. One of his most famous poems is named for a Gloucester pile of rocks, The Dry Salvages.
Good Eggs: A Memoir
By Phoebe Potts
Read it because: As a graphic memoir the illustrations say as much as the writing, and both say pithy, funny, poignant things about being alive right now, which includes for many, trying to get a baby. Potts lives in Gloucester, and keeps this place laughing and thinking.
In the Heart of Cape Ann, Or, The Story of Dogtown
By Charles E. Mann
Read it because: You will be in the 21st century reading an early 20th century dude explaining what this wild place called Dogtown was like in the 19th century, and nothing has changed.
The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America’s Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town
By Mark Kurlansky
Read it because: Above all, Kurlansky explains best why Gloucester is America’s Most Original Town.
Quit the Race
By Jonathan Strong
Read it because: As nationally-acclaimed author Stephen McCauley says, Strong writes quiet novels with universal relevance. This one is about a long-term couple struggling with how to explore their individual interests and keep their relationship alive. Who among us does not relate?
My Ex-Life
By Stephen McCauley
Read it because: This New York Times best-seller is secretly set in the small Cape Ann town where McCauley lives part time: Rockport.