Suggestions (conveniently arranged by topic) from The Derb, who describes them as “some current, a couple older, plus one so new it’s not actually available yet.”

Science — The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit by Melvin Konner (mine the second edition, 2002). How much of the human condition is “mere biology”? In good, nailed-down scientific results: more than anyone imagined a hundred years ago, more than most people are aware, more than we yet understand. Konner gives a comprehensive overview, thoughtful and humble, unillusioned. A classic in its field that people have been urging me to read for years. Finally just got round to it.
Math — Numbers Rule: The Vexing Mathematics of Democracy, from Plato to the Present, by George G. Szpiro (2010). I knew from reading Martin Gardner’s columns that every voting system you can devise will occasionally turn up paradoxical results — i.e., a winner nobody much wants. “A majority (Tom and Harry) prefers Bush to Gore, another majority (Tom and Dick), prefers Gore to Nader, and another majority (Harry and Dick) prefers Nader to Bush . . . ” etc. Szpiro walks you through the whole subject with very few equations.
World History — The First World War, by John Keegan (1999). I can never have enough books about Samuel Johnson, nor ever enough about World War I. Keegan is terrific. His Face of Battle is a great military classic, one of those books everyone should read even if not much interested in war. In this one, he brings his powers of judgment, historical imagination, common sense, and literary fluency to bear on the Doughboys’ war. “The simple truth of 1914–18 trench warfare is that the massing of large numbers of soldiers unprotected by anything but cloth uniforms, however they were trained, however equipped, against large masses of other soldiers, protected by earthworks and barbed wire and provided with rapid-fire weapons, was bound to result in very heavy casualties among the attackers.”
U.S. History — The High Tide of American Conservatism, by Garland S. Tucker III (available September 1; mine a review copy). Just squeaks in under the wire as a summer book, one to look out for. It’s about the 1924 election, the last in U.S. history in which both major candidates were strongly committed conservatives. Non-conservatives were represented by the Progressive candidate, “Fightin’ Bob” La Follette. He got 17 percent of the national vote. (Sigh.) His cousin Suzanne, by the way, was National Review’s first managing editor. Go figure.
Poli-Sci — Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth, by Eric Kaufmann (2010,but so far only in the U.K.). The title speaks for itself. I won’t give away the author’s answer, but there is much food for thought here.
Fiction — My fiction discovery this year has been James Gould Cozzens, who wrote carefully crafted middlebrow novels from the 1920s to the 1960s, though the general opinion is that he peaked around the middle of that range. I have committed to “do” Cozzens for a magazine in the fall, so I am reading my way through him, and as much biographical material about him as I can find. I started with Men and Brethren, and wrote about it here. I find Cozzens very simpatico, a fine cold eye, writing plain prose about real people in a real world — the world (so far as I’ve yet read) of WASP America, now at one with Nineveh and Tyre and 83 percent votes for conservatives.