What I'm reading right now- two books.

Achilles, by Elizabeth Cook. A literary re-imagining of the son of Peleus, from his birth to his death to his afterlife in Hades. Lovely.

Greek Language and Culture: Their Vitality and Importance Today, by Cedric Hubbell Whitman. This is the reprint of a lecture that Professor Whitman - a distinguished Harvard classicist and ardent philhellene - gave to the Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (Belmont, Massachusetts) in 1954. Not only is the professor a brilliant man, but he was also the mentor of Athan Anagnostopoulos, founder of The Greek Institute, located in Cambridge, Mass - where I teach, research, and webmaster -, and director of the Treasure of the Greek Language project in Athens, where he is busy scanning millions of pages of original Greek texts so that they may be stored electronically for posterity. I consider Professor Anagnostopoulos to be my mentor, so the writings of Cedric Whitman are that much more dear to me. Even without the personal connection, I find his views on the continuity of the Greek language and Greek culture to be a stirring challenge to the status quo of modern day classicists, which likes to think that Greek history ended with Alexander the Great, and even perpetuate the obnoxious and misguided argument of the German Fallmerayer that "the modern Greeks aren't even Greeks", but Slavs. Anyone who spends any time studying both Ancient and Modern Greek (as well as both the Ancient and Modern Greeks !) can't help but see how little change the centuries have actually wrought, and yet instead of celebrating such a living continuum and teaching it as such the schools of the West chop Greek up into little bits (Homeric, Classical, Koine, Byzantine, Modern) and study them in isolation. Now to be fair, the tide is changing here and there, but there's still a long way to go.