One of my favourite travel activities is pairing books with places, and this is a theme that runs through the ‘Packing for Greece’ series.
Here are the books mentioned by name in Unpacking for Greece. Those with a Greek setting (including Asia Minor – and, in one case, a Greece-like country called Ephebe on a fantasy planet) are marked with an asterisk.
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Books mentioned in Unpacking for Greece (in order of appearance)
* Shirley Valentine, a play by Willy Russell, later adapted by the playwright into the well-known movie
* Pyramids and Small Gods, Discworld fantasy novels by Terry Pratchett (apologies: no preview available)
* Asterix at the Olympic Games, the graphic novel by R Goscinny and A Uderzo that introduced me to Piraeus and the Acropolis when I was a child
* Lonely Planet Greece, my guidebook of choice
* Lonely Planet Greek Phrasebook & Dictionary (apologies: no preview available)
* Things Can Only Get Feta, memoir by Marjory McGinn, set on the Peloponnese Peninsula, which I read while I was in Monemvasia
* An Ottoman Traveller, 17th-century travelogue by Evliya Çelebi, including his experience of visiting Monemvasia
* Geographic Origins by Yiannis Ritsos (I haven’t been able to find which book contains an English translation of this poem. If you know, please tell me)
Shakespeare’s play Richard III, which mentions the malmsey wine of the Malvasia region
The White Queen, historical novel set during England’s War of the Roses, by Philippa Gregory
* Acropolis: Curse of Athena, by Philip Wooderson, who runs the writers’ retreat Limnisa with his wife Mariel
Hitch, winner of the inaugural Penguin Literary Prize in Australia, by Kathryn Hind, who also won Limnisa’s short story competition
* Middlesex, a superb novel by Greek-American author Jeffrey Eugenides, set partly in Asia Minor and partly in Detroit, USA
What’s Great About This? How to Be Resilient and Thrive through Disruption and Change, by resilience coach Dominic Siow, who encouraged me to ask myself what could make my life extraordinary
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, from The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis, featuring Aslan, whose name means ‘The Lion’ in Turkish
* The Thread, historical novel by Victoria Hislop, set in Thessaloniki
* Salonica: City of Ghosts, non-fiction by Mark Mazower, which I read while at Limnisa
* My Family and Other Animals a childhood memoir, set on Corfu, by the great naturalist Gerald Durrell and featuring his writer brother Lawrence Durrell
Uncommon Type, an anthology of short stories by philhellene movie star Tom Hanks
* The Greek Islands, by twentieth-century philhellene Lawrence Durrell, brother to Gerald
* Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, translated by Samuel Butler, a steal at 99c
* Virgil’s The Aeneid, the Penguin Classics edition translated by Robert Fagles
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, a fictionalised memoir set in India, and my niece Carly’s favourite book
Repacking for Greece, the second book in the ‘Packing for Greece’ series, which can be read either as a sequel or as a stand-alone story.
Click here for the list of books mentioned in Repacking for Greece
COMING SOON: More recommendations for Greece-themed books
Sally Jane Smith 