Book recs?

[her_fathers_gun]

I'm wondering if anyone has any book recommendations for:

• Comparative demon and/or mystical beast mythology--something that would talk about different traditions, rather than in a single cultural context
• Good histories of the expansion of connections between world regions in the first half of the past millennium--exploration, trade, things like that. I have a vague memory from some of my academic work of the, say, 14th-17th centuries being called the "first wave of globalization," but don't know enough to go find histories of that period (or even what it's properly called)
• Introductory books about computational linguistics (including its history)

I'm fine with reading books pitched either to a scholarly or a general audience, though I don't have any background in these areas. And non-book resources like websites are obviously totally cool too.

Thanks!