100 books like Mermaid Singing

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. 

This is a dreamer’s book—notes about life, literature, and the universe written by the author after accepting on the spur of the moment a Greek friend’s invitation to go island-hopping in a little sailing boat.

I like it not just because I knew the author’s late daughter and treasure his affectionate references to her, but also for its erudite musings and reflections. They remind me of how, even from the deck of one of today’s decidedly unromantic ferries, the glinting sea and island silhouettes induce a state of semi-trance or reverie, pushing your thoughts into overdrive.

The author was a heavyweight figure on Greece’s literary scene, but this little book is charming, short, and accessible.

Arrian is one of the few primary sources used to illuminate the campaigns of Alexander the Great. It is also one of the few primary sources to focus directly on the Scythians – in this case, the Saka (an eastern group of Scythians). After conquering the Bactrian region, Alexander faced war with the Scythians, as well as local rebellions, which the Scythians played a role in. Arrian’s account is an important source for understanding the Scythians as it speaks directly to the clash of an army built for pitched battle against an army build for more mobile warfare.

Frederic Kakis, a brilliant scientist and moving writer, shares a personal story of survival and fortitude for a Jewish family in Northern Greece during the Nazi occupation. Close to 80,000 were relocated to Nazi concentration campus far from their homes in Thessaloniki and close to 60,000 did not survive the Holocaust. Dr. Kakis describes the terror experienced as well as the courage shown by Greek Jews and their local Christian neighbors during this tragic invasion, and how their efforts helped as many of the vulnerable as possible survive. 

As an author of mystery-thrillers, including the Sherlock Holmes Pastiche, “Elementary, My Dear Spock” as well as a longtime fan of Agatha Christie, I was drawn to the appeal of an ancient Greek “detective”, Heracles Pontor investigating murders in Plato’s Athens. And, Somoza does not disappoint, inviting us to share Pontor’s journey down a rabbit hole that grows ever more intriguing and dangerous page by page. Somoza welcomes us with a beautifully translated murder mystery that soon envelopes us in a fascinating exploration of Plato, reality, and, as reflected in the original Spanish title, the Cave of Ideas. 

Paul Cartledge is one of the best Greek historians alive today. Though profoundly knowledgeable about Greece and its history, he writes in a way that non-specialists can follow and appreciate.

I particularly like this book because, through a series of antitheses (Greek/barbarian, free/enslaved, male/female, myth/history), Cartledge gives the reader a splendid picture of the intellectual background against which Herodotus was writing his history.

I also like that, by comparing several contemporary authors with Herodotus, Cartledge can show (explicitly or implicitly) what is distinctive about Herodotus and his worldview.

For my high school sophomore history teacher, world history was only Greece under Pericles and England under Elizabeth I. I went to Greece under her spell, and ever since, I have been drawn to books about Greece—fiction and non-fiction.

This book is about a fictional Greek island at the end of the Ottoman empire, an English con man caught up in his archaeological con, a beautiful artist (played by a young Helen Mirren in the film version), greedy government officials, and an informer who fears for his life is our unreliable narrator. It makes for an engrossing novel of adventure and ideas that holds up on a second reading after over forty years. 

This is a dual memoir and each woman is on a quest to redefine herself. Sue Monk Kidd as a writer and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor as she asks the age-old question: “what to do with my life.” 

Written in alternating chapters, mother and daughter write of their experiences and insights as they visit sacred sights in ancient lands, places rich with myth and legend and the sacred feminine. My journey too was as a seeker, a woman thick with an urgency to write as Sue was, and as a single woman exploring “now what?” 

While I traveled alone and these women traveled together, each of us was on our own individual journey, exploring, discovering, asking questions, and seeking answers that can often only be found when we travel within.