A few books that stand out in my mind, among those that I've read recently:
Briefly, The Historian is a fabulous book about the search for Vlad Dracula. Middlesex is ... hard to explain. It's a Pulitzer winner and it's by the author of the Virgin Suicides (but much better). The Time Traveler's Wife is a fantastic story about an oddly tragic love affair. Calamity Physics is hard to explain, but it's a fun read. The Geographer's Library and The Codex are both pseudo-intellectual books about the search for buried historical treasure; The Codex is the least good of them, I think.
If you have to choose only one or two, I'd recommend going in order of the list above.
If you've liked any one of these, I bet that you'll like the rest.
Most of these books fall in the same "fantastic" category as Possession and Hallucinating Foucault
You can see a bunch of books that were highly recommended to me (or, in a few cases, are trashy sci fi books that I want to read ;) on my Amazon wish list. Probably the most intriguing is "World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War"...
--titus
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