As a history aficionado, I'm glad this thread exists as well. I've always loved history. Got a few degrees in the subject and probably would have gone on further had it not been for the credit crunch. My areas of interest/specialty have always been in cultural and social history, largely in modern Europe (post 1789-to the present) with a particular interest in postwar Germany. Over the past few years, the rise of populism and Trumpism has encouraged me to get back into reading more to try and help myself understand how we've got here. I've also tried to undertake more broader historical reading habits to correct blindspots with regards to certain periods or areas of the world.
I'll be the first to admit here, the history books I've always enjoyed argely have an academic bent to them and I'm not overly keen on military history. I've always preferred a history of war book that looks at the conflict from a social and cultural perspective, as opposed to a military angle. Subsequently, my recommendations probably lean more towards works that feature a scholarly analysis rather than popular history. Additionally, I've always preferred a broad overview text that incorporates an analytical examination of a period or subject instead of a rote memorization of facts about "Great Men."
The first book I'd recommend is one of my favourite history books that I spent years putting off reading: A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes. This is a scholarly tome. I had to prepare myself to sit down and read this by carving out enough time to fully appreciate it. Thus, I made sure to start it during a week when I was at home over the Christmas break with nothing else to do. And it was well worth it. My edition of Figes' book (the recent Bodley Head anniversary one) is almost nine hundred pages of text and around seventy pages of bibliographic notes. Figes splits the book into four main parts looking at Tsarism,
Figes astutely goes into almost every single aspect of Russian culture, economics, society and politics that you could imagine to explain the turbulent events of the time, while making the people involved feel real with all their warts, hypocrisies and naivety. The main characters one often hears of are richly described - Nicholas II, Rasputin, Lenin, Trotsky, Prince Lvov, Gorky, Kerensky, Stolypin etc. - but Figes also crucially looks into aspects that are often neglected in broad Anglo-American works that touch on the period: the chaotic blend of savagery and violence found in Russian peasant culture, the misplaced mysticism and pull of the Cult of the Tsar and the colossal errors made by the likes of the Mensheviks and SRs that allowed the Bolsheviks to gain control.
One of the best things about this book is how Figes shows that none of this had to happen. He demonstrates the multiple opportunities that various entities and figures could have acted to stop the revolution and the subsequent bloodshed from occurring. I think sometimes people seem to think that certain historical events unfold with a sort of predestination in mind. Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers is another book that comes to mind in showing how much agency certain groups and individuals have had in the build-up to major events, in which they could have significantly altered the course of history by pulling a lever to turn in an alternative direction or pull the brakes on events with serious consequences *cough* Brexit *cough*
Figes later went one step further in a follow-up book (Revolutionary Russia) in which he pondered whether the entire hundred year period between 1891-1991 acted as a giant revolutionary cycle.
