One of my favorite non-fiction topics is a sub-genre often called "micro-histories." Rather than being books about major historical events on an epic, vast scale, these books focus in on something specific or mundane, tracing its history.
Recently, I got on a tangent of reading a few different books on the history of color theory and pigments, so when I stumbled across photos of the carmine bee-eater bird species, I recognized the beautiful color from my reading.