Here are a few that come to mind right now:<p><i>Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East</i> by Amanda H Podany - Covers how international relations worked between the different rulers of the Ancient Near East. Covers different things and in a different way than I had heard in a lot of other ANE history.<p><i>Up, Up, and Away: The Kid, the Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, and the Ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos</i> by Jonah Keri - Lots of fun, interesting stuff about a sport I like and a team I didn't know too much about.<p><i>Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World</i> by Noel Malcolm - This one is really good, covering the history of a single family amidst the relationships between the Ottoman Empire and the Christian world.<p><i>The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code</i> by Margalit Fox - Another excellent book, this discussing how Linear B was deciphered, with particular emphasis placed on Alice Kober, whose work was largely overlooked since she died before Michael Ventris ultimately deciphered it.<p><i>The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832</i> by Alan Taylor - This one won the Pulitzer for history in 2014, so that should tell you something. This book covers an aspect of history I had never heard before, with a lot of focus on slaves themselves, rather than their owners or the people around them. The roles of the British as liberators and slaves as their aids in the War of 1812 is very interesting.<p>And one last one that I'm currently reading is <i>Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire</i> by Peter H. Wilson. I haven't finished it yet, so take this with a grain of salt, but it's very interesting to hear about a large aspect of European history I wasn't too familiar with and that doesn't fit into the neat, centralized nation-state based history of the world that is predominantly taught.