Azam Ahmed, a New York Times correspondent, tells the true story of a Mexican woman who sets out to seek revenge after a drug cartel kidnaps and murders her daughter.

Adam Higginbotham’s deep research and meticulously constructed story behind the space shuttle Challenger disaster is a true page turner that will also anger you.

From elephants to fruit flies, Ed Yong will make sure you never look at animals the same way again. Incredible book.

I love Jack Lynch’s book because it destroys all the myths we were taught about the “rules of English.” Spoiler alert: you can end sentences with prepositions and split infinitives.

Writing about the history of music isn’t easy, but Kelefa Sanneh, staff writer for the New Yorker, brings the magazine’s style to this fantastic book.

Kendra Atleework’s memoir takes place in the remote California desert. It’s a powerful story of family and place bound up with ramifications of climate change and water rights. So so good.

I’m a big fan of Gioia’s other books on music, and this is an extraordinarily well-researched book on the history of the Mississippi blues. If you like rock n’ roll, you need to know its roots. Hint: it’s not Elvis.

Douglas Preston, a writer for the New Yorker, accompanies archaeologists into the Honduran rainforest to search for a long abandoned civilization. They find it—and get a life-threatening disease in the process. I devoured this book.

Don Kulick is a linguist who spends several long periods doing ethnographic fieldwork with a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea, recording its native language of Tayap before the language becomes extinct and its members fully embrace Tok Pisin.

David Grann’s knack for suspenseful storytelling and meticulous research shines in this story of the 1920s serial murders on the Osage reservation. Grann is a staff writer for the New Yorker.

That’s correct: Cecelia Watson’s book is about the history of the semicolon. But it’s also about how punctuation happened (it’s relatively recent) and why we need it. For history of the English language lovers.

Dennis Baron, professor emeritus of English and linguistics, tells the story of how we got from he and she to zie and hir and singular they. Thankfully, he argues that singular they is, and always has been, correct.

Robert Macfarlane is no ordinary travel writer: he goes deep into places like underground sea caves, the Greenland ice cap, and bunkers where nuclear waste will be stored. He presents these places with a combination of introspection and gorgeous detail.

The Internet is coming for the English language, which means the language is changing probably faster than ever. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch explains the how and why in this fascinating book. Descriptivists, unite!

Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Moss, author of Salt Sugar Fat, continues his look at the processed food industry, aka Big Food. Meticulously researched and an eye opener.

Before Hemingway, no one wrote like him. He set out to write in a style no one had ever seen. Hemingway succeeded in The Sun Also Rises, but he made a lot of enemies in the process, according to Lesley M.M. Blume.

Theo Cateforis is a professor at Syracuse University, so this is an academic treatment of the genre of new wave music—which is rare and which I love. The writing is academic yet accessible.