This book is basically everything Tim Harford has learnt about statistics and other numbers from looking into them for the Radio 4 series, More or Less, and it’s well worth a read. Well written, easy to read and very informative.

Me & Tim seem to have a pretty similar reading list. Among the books he cites here that I’ve read before myself are Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms, The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data, How to Lie with Statistics and Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men are a few I can remember off the top of my head. And every time he cites a book I haven’t read (e.g. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable or Thinking, Fast and Slow) I make a mental note that I ought to get round to reading it.

Even having read a lot of the same sources this book is a good summary of making sense of the statistics and data in the world around you. If you haven’t read all those, and don’t want to, then I’d recommend just reading this one. Tim’s done all the thinking and you can profit from his insight. And (spoiler alert?) the final two word conclusion of the book is one I am 100% behind: “be curious”.