top three:

1. spillover: animal infections and the next human pandemic - david quammen (592 pages)
   this is technically a reread, but whatever. spillover wasn't exactly the origin of my obsession with infectious disease - that really started in earnest at the end of undergrad, long before i ever read it - but it was one of the most important influences in narrowing my focus to zoonotic diseases (i.e., diseases that jump from animals to humans) specifically. it's accessible, engaging, and (warning) will give you nightmares.
    
2. the next pandemic: on the frontline against humanity's gravest dangers - ali s. khan (288 pages)
   i have read a lot of books on infectious disease this year, but this is one of the best. dr. khan spent decades working with the cdc and the situations he's talking about are largely situations that he directly experienced, which is great, but where this really shines is his candidness and lack of ego. he's not afraid to point out places where organizations he was part of or where he himself fell short or made leaps/assumptions that weren't warranted, and he includes a lot of broader philosophical approaches to public health that are as important as the hard science but often go unaddressed. definitely recommend this one.
    
3. the cruelest miles: the heroic story of dogs and men in a race against an epidemic - gay salisbury & laney salisbury (267 pages)
   this is about a diphtheria epidemic that threatened the very remote area around nome, alaska in the 1920s. the town was nearly out of antitoxin and what they had was expired, and it was the middle of winter, which meant that getting there was just about impossible - the ocean was frozen over, planes weren't really built to handle that extreme level of cold and snowstorm, and there definitely wasn't any train or anything. so they set up a sled dog relay to travel the nearly 700 miles from the closest they could get the serum by train to nome. with windchill, it dipped down to -70F (-57C) in a fucking blizzard. a number of dogs died, and many of the mushers ended up with frostbite, but they made it there in 5.5 days and saved the town from a serious epidemic that could've killed hundreds (if not thousands). it's really an incredible story, and i'm naming the next dog i get togo after the lead dog on the most treacherous part of the trip.

honorable mentions:

• the vaccine race by meredith wadman
• polio: an american story by david m. oshinsky