1. Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter – Then, Now, and Forever by John McWhorter (Avery)

The C-word and not one but two F-words are among polymath linguist McWhorter’s chosen nine, his “lean list of the staple, principal-cast dirty words,” or, put another way: “nine nasty ways of being human.” For the stories of all the profanities, including one that McWhorter adapted for The New York Times titled “How the N-Word Became Unsayable,” read this short, elegant book. Its true magic emanates from McWhorter’s associative, capacious, agile mind working in so many registers, segueing from “Looney Tunes,” All in the Family, and Succession to 42nd Street, the Furies of Greek mythology, Shakespeare, and Joe Biden and the Affordable Care Act, plus, also evident in his Slate podcast Lexicon Valley, the joy of linguistics, “finding structure in what seems like chaos, mess, or the trivial.”

2. Tall Men, Short Shorts: The 1969 NBA Finals: Wilt, Russ, Lakers, Celtics, and a Very Young Sports Reporter by Leigh Montville (Doubleday)

Montville was a “chipmunk,” as older sportswriters dubbed him and his ilk, irritating to the older generation who saw these upstarts as too noisy and demanding, a 24-year-old Boston Globe reporter covering the fabled seven-game championship series between the longtime kings, Bill Russell’s Boston Celtics and Wilt Chamberlain’s Los Angeles Lakers. Montville re-creates the rivalry’s excitement and anxiety, climaxing in the dramatic last game with Boston victorious by two points with injured Chamberlain on the bench. Montville, a writer for Sports Illustrated and author of books like of Sting Like a Bee, his portrait of Muhammad Ali, has a gift for drawing from history and popular culture to evoke the days before sports became really big business.

3.  Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke (Pantheon)

Radtke’s graphic memoir about human isolation and longing for connection is distinguished by its visual impact, deep reporting into the science of loneliness, and view that a fractured America is more responsible for loneliness than technology, the frequent scapegoat. Drawing from her Wisconsin childhood and working in panels with many windows, Radtke’s sharp insights reflect her deep research and brilliantly associative mind, for instance, considering TV “laugh tracks,” cruel 1950’s monkey experiments, images of the lone male cowboy, and the idea of loneliness as a biological phenomenon. Radtke slyly takes her title from a ham radio operator’s call for contact: “CQ” or “Seek you.”

4. The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Perspiration by Sarah Everts (W.W. Norton)

The stinky, sticky stuff known as sweat to some and perspiration to others is the fluid secreted by humans – and horses, as well as most monkeys and apes – to keep cool, and it gets more than the sniff test in Everts’ engaging investigation into a personal annoyance. Everts explains how the millions of sweat glands operate, their output odorless until bacteria hit it, and how antiperspirants and deodorants evolved into a multibillion-dollar business.  She smashes the misperceptions that sweat detoxifies the body and that sports drinks replenish a body’s salt level. She is an entertaining guide to the sweaty world, reporting from a very hot “sauna theater” with a naked audience and interviewing heavy sweaters who undergo surgery to correct their slippery problem.

5. Embassy Wife by Katie Crouch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Smart, funny novels with heart are tough to come by, especially when they have a satirical edge, but Embassy Wife belongs on a shelf with Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble. Set in Namibia, the story revolves around two American women and one Namibian, with husbands differently involved in the foreign diplomatic corps and their children in the elite Windhoek International School. Crouch artfully pillories American exceptionalism and colonialism through families living in various degrees of luxury and conformity while propelling the novel through mysteries and deception.