The best books to challenge your preconceptions

A book on statistics that is interesting? Yes, actually. And The Tiger that Isn’t is more than just interesting, it’s useful. Maths was never my strong point at school, but even someone who never got the hang of quadratic equations can learn to ask useful questions when faced with bamboozlingly large numbers and dodgy ‘averages’. 

This book offers a way to see through statistics that are used to conceal information as much as to reveal it. It’s worth reading just for the section on rice and random distribution. And the tiger in the title? It’s what happens when you think you see a pattern (in this case, stripes in the undergrowth), but there is no pattern at all. 

Quirkology has a whole chapter on jokes, and the search for the funniest one. I listened to this as an audiobook and did a lot of chortling while I was out walking. (Fortunately there weren’t too many people around.) 

But there’s also plenty of serious and handy stuff, about whether you can tell when you are being lied to, what makes some people “luckier” than others, and what to talk about during speed dating. (Men should talk about travel, not films, if they want to make a connection with the opposite sex.) 

There’s also a section on nominative determinism (your name defining your destiny), and the irony was not lost on author and researcher, Dr. Wiseman. 

I’m sneaking a novel in amongst all this nonfiction. Ben Elton’s books usually make you think, while also making you laugh. This one dispenses with the laughs and messes with your understanding of time, consequences, and history instead. 

I enjoy time travel stories, and because I’ve read a fair few of them, I felt pretty confident that I understood what was going on: Be careful when you change the past, unintended consequences, and all that. But I had not understood, and the twist at the end really hit home. I won’t give any spoilers, but the significance of a simple chair and some scuff marks in the dust is still imprinted in my mind many years after reading it.

This clever and funny book explains that there are specific techniques that make good writing sound good, or a pithy phrase stick in the mind, and tells you the long and difficult Greek (or slightly easier Latin) names for all these rules you kind of knew without actually knowing.

I can hardly retain any of the Greek labels, but I do remember the fun little examples, like why Oscar Wilde’s epigrams are so striking (antithesis) and how Shakespeare totally lifted part of Julius Caesar from a historian, but polished it up (alliteration). And whenever you hear a memorable three-part phrase, it was probably longer but everyone forgot the other bits (tricolon). 

This is not one for fans of utilitarian writing, but as Forsyth says, “To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility.”

The subtitle of this book is a pretty accurate summary. The more pessimistic opinion often seems the more plausible, but these Swedish researchers provide lots of data, graphs and logical sense to show that things are not as black, or as black and white, as we often think.

I hate being wrong about things, but worse than being wrong is staying wrong once you know better, so with some discomfort but a lot of pleasure I learned from this book why labels like ‘the third world’ and ‘the global south’ are inexact and unhelpful, and what toothbrushes and children drowning have to do with economic development. Genuinely eye-opening.