Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece by Patrick Leigh FermorNew York Review of Books, 2006 (originally John Murray, Publishers, 1966)

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s prose is wonderfully precise: it seems like each word has been carefully chosen from a rich and expansive vocabulary, and the result is a collection of essays where the tone of each seems perfectly suited to its subject matter. There are shepherds and monks, mountain-top monasteries and bus rides in the middle of nowhere; there’s a wonderfully pleasing story about a pair of Byron’s shoes. The final short essay, “Sounds of the Greek World,” is especially wonderful — the play of rhythms and images.