Literary Boston 2-25-12

There are so many great authors who live or lived in Boston and some who even wrote about it. For our first salon of 2012 (starting our 3rd year!) we read works from some of those authors. It was hard to choose just a few!

We started off with a shared reading of a little history lesson about the earliest days of Massachusetts from The True Travels, Adventures And Observations Of Captain John Smith V1: In Europe, Asia, Africa And America, 1593-1629.

Miss Mina jumped to the present day with Dennis Lehane’s A Drink Before the War. Private detective Patrick Kenzie musing about his home neighborhood of Dorchester and the very different Dorchester his suspect lives in.

Jena Kitten chose Robert Frost’s poem “snow”, which can be found in the collection Robert Frost’s Poems.

Betty Blaize wrapped up the first half of the salon with Edgar Allan Poe’s chilling story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Poe is also claimed by New York and Baltimore, but he was born in Boston and served in the army at Fort Independence, now Castle Island. The story can be found in Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.

Tough guy private detective Spenser has been living and working in Boston since the 1960’s. In God Save the Child he meets the love of his life and Miss Mina read about their first date.

Betty has a fondness for pigs and she read a selection from The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood about the title character’s short lived modeling career. She thought the book was set in Western Massachusetts, realized it was New Hampshire, and decided it was too good to pass up.

Besides short stories, Poe also wrote poems and Jena graced us with the haunting “Annabel Lee”, also to be found in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385074077/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=bostonbabydol-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0385074077">Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.

Science fiction author Jennifer Pelland usually writes stories about people uncomfortable in their own skins. They are that much more disturbed when set in familiar territory, like Cambridge or Somerville. Mina read the uncharacteristically sweet and dreamlike story “Last Bus” from the collection Unwelcome Bodies. Jen will be reading from her new novel Machine at Annie’s Book Stop in Worcester on March 17th (and bellydancing to Irish music too!)

Betty ended the salon with “The Wreck of the Hesperus” by legendary poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Thank you for joining us! Our next salon will be on Friday, April 6th at The Great Burlesque Exposition and will feature readers from several NGR chapters.