As one who reads a greater than average number of books, I naturally find myself enjoying some more than others. And indeed, with regularity one is found to be more worthy of note than others I may have recently read. But the moments of greatest joy are had when I find myself halfway through a book and out of sheer reading-induced ecstasy demanding of myself “How, for Gaia’s sake, could I have not long since already known of – and more to the point been reading – this author’s books?”
Such a book is Adrienne Mayor‘s newly published Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws: And Other Classical Myths, Historical Oddities, and Scientific Curiosities from Princeton University Press. In this new book Ms. Mayor, a research scholar in the Department of Classics at Stanford University, collects together a truly delightful assortment of essays that blend Greek, Roman, and other classics with folklore, mythology, the history of science, natural history, literary history, and personal adventure (often in museums, libraries, archeological dig sites, and other places that are on my, and most likely your as well, list of destinations we’d love to visit – and perhaps there remain indefinitely).
Quite often upon closing the book after reading one of its included essays (so far my favorite has been about her long ongoing hunt for explanatory evidence about one of the title subjects: Griffins) I feel as though my mind is about to burst having had so much information and so many new ideas pumped into it. If you haven’t already begun reading a copy of this remarkable new book, I very much encourage you to begin doing so at the earliest opportunity.
