100 books like Aegean Notebooks

This is the daddy of travel books about Greece, penned by a Greek from western Turkey who toured the sights during the pax Romana (2nd century AD).

Catching ancient Greece before it fell into ruin, he enthusiastically wrote up the buildings and artworks and the local history of places both famous and obscure. My own copy, decidedly battered, has been a companion of my academic career since my twenties.

You can still follow Pausanias on certain archaeological sites, like Delphi or Olympia. On others it’s fascinating, after visiting them, to turn to this ancient guide to read how he described the same places when they were intact.

Peter Levi’s translation is highly readable and well equipped, but not overladen, with footnotes.  

This book is a gem for lovers of Greece and of superlative English prose.

For me the book is far and away the best evocation of a wild and remote part of Greece that I got to know and treasure when tramping through its olive fields in search of ancient inscriptions. Leigh Fermor was incapable of writing a dull sentence.

His imagination allied with what he observed himself in his wanderings combine to bring out all the strangeness of Mani’s history of brigands and vendettas, of villages bristling with defensive towers and of fishermen descended—perhaps—from Byzantine emperors.   

This book brings back to life the pioneering British archaeologists who, basing themselves at the atmospheric Villa Ariadne, rediscovered the prehistoric civilisation of the Minoans at Knossos on the island of Crete.

I love this book because it brings back memories of when I excavated at Knossos—the local workmen lowered an apprehensive me into an ancient well to measure its depth and I stayed next door to the Villa, taking walks in the surrounding countryside carpeted with wildflowers.

The Villa was purloined by the Germans in World War II. The book also taught me about the bravery of the Cretan resistance to the Nazis, including the dramatic kidnap of a German general on the Villa’s doorstep. 

Clift creates a sympathetic and highly informative picture of the islanders of Kalymnos in Greece’s Dodecanese.

She lived here with her family in the 1950s, when the island’s males made their dangerous living from diving for sponges. Clift brilliantly captures the suspended animation of the families left behind by the diving fleet, loved ones who could only hope that fathers and sons would return alive and intact.

I’m familiar with today’s Kalymnos, its port choc-a-bloc with tourist boats. It’s salutary to be reminded of the hardships of traditional island life and how modern tourism can be a benefit, not a blight.

Art inspires passion, and can lead to romance.

This book provides the thrills and escapism of my favorite type of movies – a heroine in an exotic location, who meets a handsome stranger while becoming involved in the theft of an ancient artifact, a golden snake goddess. 

There’s the danger of the discovery and display of these ancient artifacts, which are the target of international art thieves and unscrupulous collectors, and leads to murder. The main character becomes a main suspect, and as she tries to investigate to save herself she only gets in deeper.

Fans of The Man Who Knew Too Much and the recent movie Red Notice will love this.

This is an outstanding short introduction to Greek history – with a really neat gimmick. Instead of writing a standard kind of history, Cartledge picks on the eleven most prominent cities of ancient Greece and writes up their story in about ten or twelve pages. But the chapters are also organized chronologically, so that the first two cities, Cnossos and Mycenae, illustrate Greek prehistory. Then we move on to the Archaic Period (four places, including Sparta), then the Classical Period (three, including Athens), and then the Hellenistic period (one: Alexandria, the greatest city in the world before Rome). He ends with a leap into late antiquity and the eastern Roman empire with Byzantium. I’m always on the lookout for books that can turn people on to Greek history, get them to share my (and Cartledge’s) passion: this one does it brilliantly.

This is the ideal introduction to the thousand-year, Greek-speaking empire of Byzantium that lasted right through the Middle Ages until the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. A joy to read, and beautifully illustrated, it brings together the strange contradictions of an empire that was at once intensely Christian and spiritual but also loved power and wealth and invented the arts of diplomacy as we know them today.

A Greek bureaucrat is accompanied by two old members of the Varangian Guard escorting money from one part of the Byzantium Empire to another. Each night he has to put up with one or the other Norsemen telling him about the discovery of America: one thinks the other is his best mate when in fact the man hates him and spends most of the adventure trying to get away from him. Accompanying them is a young put-on squadie who, in later years, became known as Harald Hardrada, Christendom’s greatest warrior who spread war and fear throughout the north sea lands.

I found it all so funny and it encouraged me to stick quite a bit of humour in my all own writings, not that I needed much encouragement.

Not – repeat not – because I am its editor and wrote more than half of it but mainly because this is I believe the one-volume, one-stop-shop book to have on your shelves or digitally on your computer if you want to gain something like a complete understanding and appreciation of the world or rather worlds of Ancient Greece. I can do no better than quote from the ‘blurb’ provided online by the C.U.P. itself.

It is sumptuously illustrated throughout, almost entirely in colour. It offers fresh interpretations of the whole range of ‘Classical’ Greek culture, different aspects of which are expertly handled by members of an international cast of top-notch scholars both male and female. These aspects include: the influences of the environment and economy; the effects of interstate tensions; the implications of (bi-, homo-, hetero-normative) sexuality; the experiences of workers, soldiers, slaves, peasants and women; and the roles… show more.

Moonflower Murders shows what can be done at the boundary between genre and literary fiction. This is a writer at the top of his form with twisty plotting, mellifluous prose, and the sheer joy of storytelling. Realistic? No. But that’s not the point. This is an insane murder mystery within a murder mystery. A sequel to Magpie Murders, it features retired publisher Susan Ryeland, who now runs a small hotel on a Greek island. But running a small hotel on a Greek island isn’t for everyone, and Susan is beginning to miss her old life in London.

She is pushed into returning when two of her guests inform her that their newlywed daughter had been in dangerous proximity to a murder back home and had now gone missing – hours after reading a murder mystery Susan herself had edited in her old life. The book holds the key to… show more.