Here is a not-really-random assortment of four recommendations:
Water Technology in the Middle Ages: Cities, Monasteries, and Waterworks after the Roman Empire, Roberta J Magnusson. I don't care what your specialisation is, read this. It's magnificent. It's excellent. I love every word. Water is important to human life, ergo this book is important to human understanding. Unironically my top favourite amongst any possible book, ever. Like, screw all the popular Roman stuff, inject that water straight into my veins
Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History, Roel Konijnendijk. If you really want me to recommend a milhist title, then this one. Screw 300 and the popular picture, do you want to see what Greek warfare really was? Get a load of this. And as you can see from the title it also approaches Greek warfare as a function of culture, not just a decontextualised look at hOw HoPlItEs FoUgHt - ergh. Hoplites, schmoplites.
With Zeal and With Bayonets Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775-1783, Matthew H Spring. Spring has my eternal enmity for that goddamn title, which is so dang flintlock fantasy that it hurts. A most excellent analysis of how the British performed during the American Revolution. Doubly recommended for American readers, as it takes on the School Narrative of 'hidebound British line infantry vs wily Patriot skirmishers' that the war gets reduced to.
The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England, Barbara A Hanawalt. I have been meaning to return to this book as I'm only partway through, but I love every single bit of it so far. The problem with a lot of societies, we just don't have the source base to discuss what the average family was like, and thus we are left only with a picture of the elites. Hanawalt sets out to rectify this problem for Medieval England.
Hey there - you may be interested in the AskHistorians booklist, which is curated by our flairs and gives a lot of recommendations for reading on a number of different history topics.
“Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety” by Eric Schlosser is a great read if you’re into contemporary or Cold War history.
Schlosser combines investigative journalism and history as he details the development of nuclear weapons in the 20th century and explains several ‘broken arrow’ events (military accidents that involve nuclear weapons). The book is split pretty equally between a narrative recount of the 1980 Damascus broken arrow incident in the US and the historical development of nuclear weapons, so has plenty of fucking terrifying Cold War history and some genuinely gripping writing in the more narrative sections. It was one of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for History finalists, I’d highly recommend it.