Funny books / Lexicography books: A highly entertaining account of the author's career writing definitions and responding to reader mail at Merriam Webster, including defining swear words and the surprisingly complex history of "irregardless". Keep an eye out for Kory Stamper's upcoming book about colour terms as well! (Lingthusiasm episode about it)

Books about language learning: A rich balance of psycholinguistic research and personal memoir about losing and regaining one's heritage language, told through the author's relationship to Czech and languages of Canada, including English, French, and several Indigenous languages. (Relevant Lingthusiasm episode, a review we liked)

Books about language learning: For even more intense multilingualism, try this book about people who know dozens of languages.

Interactive books: If you're excited by the idea of figuring out patterns in various languages like a linguist, this book has tons of language-based puzzles plus solutions and more context about the languages they're based on. The puzzles are derived from the Linguistics Olympiads, a competition for high school students around the world, so they assume no prior knowledge of linguistics, but some are still quite tricky! (Gretchen's thread, Lauren’s review)

Books about conlanging: An absorbing ethnographic account of people who make languages for fun and philosophy, from historical ontologies of the universe to modern-day conlanging conferences. (Gretchen's review)

Books about conlanging: For a more hands-on approach to making a language yourself (Gretchen's thread, Lauren’s review).

Books about languages: Short chapters of interesting linguistic tidbits from the 20 most spoken languages around the world.

Books about languages: Has lively metaphors about how the study of language works and draws on lots of languages. (Gretchen's review) 

Something a bit more intense: An accessible introduction to various aspects of formal linguistics research. If you've read so many pop ling books that you're starting to recognize some of the same anecdotes over and over, this book will have some research studies you haven't heard of already, especially in the latter chapters. (As does the Sedivy book; Lauren's review)

A book by a host of Lingthusiasm: Our cohost has written a book about internet language, but podcast fans may be especially interested to know that she read the audiobook herself, so here's a thread about that (people really like the keysmash part). People also tell us that they're reading it to find out about how emoji are like gesture and why some older people use dot dot dot all the time. 

An intro linguistics textbook: This open-access intro linguistics textbook is available for free online, including text and video versions of each section.

Lingthusiasm cohosts were also writers for Crash Course Linguistics, a series of 16 intro linguistics videos (10 minutes each), which we've paired here with supporting Olympiad puzzles and other free online resources as a sort of curriculum. 

Fiction with alien languages: A first-contact story on a remote planet featuring the challenges of communicating with sentient plants (from the plant's perspective). We talked about it in this Lingthusiasm bonus episode.