There's a top book list on the FAQ of this subreddit and so I wondered what the historians of /r/AskHistorians thought about this year's crop? Favourite book in your field? In another field? For the general reader?
I have been deeply engrossed in Stalin: Paradoxes of Power 1878-1928 by Kotkin.
This is an amazingly detailed and authoritative look at Stalin. Kotkin spent years digging through archival records held at the Hoover Institution and in Moscow.
Its projected to be a 3 part series, but this first part goes into an incredibly deep account of Stalin's early years using mostly primary sources. What I enjoy is that it recalls his personal life, but also goes deeper into the context of world politics at the time, and gives a magnificent account of general life in the Czarist Russia, a broad history of its societal/political structure, and the intrigues of Bolshevik origins.
It has blown my mind. The book has been WILDLY praised.
Here is a 25 min discussion he held with Peter Robinson that will give you an overview
I have it as an audiobook which I use while hiking, and get lost in it for 3 hours at a time.
Without a doubt Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America.
The book is a collection of essays written by historians, archaeologists, biological anthropologists, and ethnohistorians about the multiple factors influencing Native North American population dynamics after contact. Most of the material in the book has been published before, but this is the first time the data is brought together in one volume, and I anticipate it will be the go to book on the topic for a while. The book isn't really aimed at the general reader, so it will seem very dry for those seeking a popular history book, but if you have any interest in the topic this is a great resource.
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome - and it's amazing.
Not a historian, but The German War was fascinating. It's WWII from the POV of German soldiers and citizens, which I'd never seen in depth before.
It answers questions including "What did the citizenry know about the deaths of the Jews and when?" (A lot; there was common public sentiment that the bombings of Hamburg and Dresden were punishment for "what we did to the Jews.") "Why didn't Germany surrender when it was obvious they were losing?" (Because of the way they lost WWI, "surrendering" abruptly when the Kaiser's propaganda was telling them they were winning every day; because many people felt that "this time we have to win, so that our children don't have to fight WWIII.")
Much of the content is drawn from letters and diaries, so it sidesteps the emotional revisionism a lot of people performed after the war - the documents show what people really thought at that time.
I think anybody interested in the history of science should read Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science Against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo by Christopher Graney. It talks about the debate between the Copernican and Tychonic systems in the mid 17th century, what both sides' major arguments were, and argues that the Tychonic system was probably better supported by contemporary evidence than the Copernican system.
Really the book is great, extremely interesting and very readable.
I have mentioned it in two different 'Reading and Research' threads but Capwell's Armour of the English Knight 1400-1450 is definitely the book of the year in medieval armour and weapons history (not that the competetion is abundant). Probably the most ground-breaking work released in the past 15 years or so, since The Knight and the Blast Furnace (albeit with a much smaller scope).