Last year, I learned a piece of information so startling that I spent months repeating it to anyone who would listen. It came from my colleague Elizabeth Kolbert’s book “The Sixth Extinction,” and it is this: sixty-six million years ago, when the asteroid that ended the cretaceous period struck the Yucatán Peninsula, dinosaurs in Canada had roughly two minutes to live. Grim for them, of course, but what a great tidbit for readers—and one that reminds me, every time I think of it, of the underrated but magnificent literary pleasure of facts.

That kind of pleasure is most readily found in nonfiction, of course, but really you can experience it anywhere. I didn’t know the first thing about Japanese-Dutch relations until I read “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” a novel by David Mitchell, and I doubt there is a better or more beautiful way to learn about the life of Emily Brontë than by reading Anne Carson’s poem “The Glass Essay.” Other delights abound in books, of course—important ideas, beautiful prose, psychological precision, Newark-to-LAX-without-ever-looking-up levels of entertainment. Yet there are few things I cherish in a book so much as a wonderful fact artfully deployed; I read, in part, to be amazed by the world. In lieu of a list of my favorite books of 2015, then, here are some of the best facts I learned from books I read this year.

Ian Fleming wrote “Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang” (from “The Man with the Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming’s James Bond Letters,” edited by Fergus Fleming)

In 1961, while recuperating from a heart attack, the author of “Goldfinger” and “Octopussy” took a break from writing spy fiction for grownups to write flying-car fiction for kids. The result was the children’s classic “Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang,” which was based on bedtime stories that Ian Fleming told his son. The book has in common with the 007 series an appealing love of gadgetry; Fleming’s letters reveal that he hoped it would be illustrated by Amherst Villiers, “a motor car and guided missile designer of absolutely top caliber.”

During the Civil War, a group of counties in northern Alabama and eastern Tennessee rejected the Confederacy and tried to form a new state called Nickajack. (From “Alabama: The History of a Deep South State,” by William Warren Rogers, Robert David Ward, Leah Rawls Atkins, and Wayne Flint.)

In 1861, after Virginia voted to secede from the Union, forty-one counties that had opposed the vote broke away and formed a new state: West Virginia. That is exactly what the citizens of northern Alabama and eastern Tennessee tried and failed to do with the proposed state of Nickajack. (The name, a corruption of a Cherokee word, also applies to the geographic area in general and to a lake in Tennessee.) Like the West Virginians, the would-be Nickajackians were more motivated by economic and practical concerns than by deep moral opposition to slavery. Because they lived in a poorer and less agricultural region where slave ownership was relatively uncommon, they feared that they would wind up paying—including with their lives—for a cause that did not benefit them. That, of course, is exactly what happened when the independence effort failed and both states joined the Confederacy. One place in Alabama, however, did secede on its own: Winston County, which was known for a while as “The Free State of Winston.”

Aaron Burr’s grandfather was Jonathan Edwards. (From Gore Vidal's “Burr.”)

If you’ve seen “Hamilton,” the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, or listened to Hamiltunes, you might have caught a line sung by Leslie Odom, Jr., in the role (which he plays with Othello-like gravitas) of Aaron Burr: “My grandfather was a fire and brimstone preacher / but there are things that the homilies and hymns won’t teach ya.” Having registered that line only in passing, I was startled to learn, while reading Gore Vidal’s fictional account of Burr’s life, that the preacher in question is none other than Jonathan Edwards—perhaps the most important religious leader in early America, and the one who gave us “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

Speaking of preachers, the word “poltergeist” was coined by Martin Luther. (From Philip Ball’s “Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen.”)

Thirteen years after he posted his famous ninety-five theses on the doors of a church in Wittenberg, Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet listing a hundred and fourteen grievances against the Catholic Church. The fifth item—following close on the heels of indulgences—was just one word long: “poltergeists.” (He objected to the way the Church used ghost stories to frighten congregants into holding multiple masses for the dead, supposedly to quiet their souls.) Luther coined the term, which literally means “noisy spirits.” Sadly, another word he liked for ghosts, this one derived from the German for “rattle” or “rumble,” did not catch on in English: rumpelgeist.

Those wrinkles you get in your fingers and toes after a long bath are basically rain treads. (From Cynthia Barnett’s “Rain: A Natural and Cultural History.”)

Why do your fingers and toes turn all pruney after soaking in water? I’d assumed that the answer was osmosis, until I came across the real explanation in Cynthia Barnett’s “Rain.” Since the nineteen-thirties, Barnett writes, researchers have known that people with nerve damage in their arms don’t develop water wrinkles in their fingers; subsequent scientists discovered that the wrinkling process is triggered by the autonomic nervous system. More recently, the neurobiologist Mark Changizi has argued that the wrinkles are an adaptation that helped our barefoot (and barehanded) ancestors negotiate their environment during extended rainy periods; on wet surfaces, hands and feet, like tires, grip better when they’re ridged.

The list of women who pioneered the field of investigative journalism (Ida Tarbell, Ida B. Wells, Nellie Bly) includes a badass Swede you’ve never heard of**.** (From Fredrik Sjöberg’s “The Fly Trap.”)

One of my favorite books of this year was “The Fly Trap,” by the writer and entomologist Fredrik Sjöberg, who appears to be the Geoff Dyer of Sweden: funny, astute, intellectually voracious, simultaneously self-absorbed and self-critical. Like Dyer, Sjöberg can’t resist straying from his putative subject toward any nearby attraction, which is how, in a book about insects, we wind up learning about Ester Nordström. Born in 1891, Nordström began working as a journalist under the pseudonym The Boy and, at the age of twenty-three, wrote a best-selling book that exposed the harsh working conditions of household servants in Sweden. A kind of female Bruce Chatwin, Nordstrom toured around Sweden by motorcycle; hitchhiked alone across the U.S., in 1922 (and wrote a book about it); spent five years exploring Kamchatka (ditto); wrote a series of young-adult novels about tomboys; and, apparently, caused everyone she encountered, male and female, to fall in love with her.