The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver. I had high hopes for this book hoping for some of that jaw-dropping insight from earlier books such as Freakonomics and Moneyball, but it didn’t meet my expectations. I still recommend the book, especially if you haven’t read these earlier books. Goods books that give us greater insight into how we let our selves be fooled, helps us separate the signal from the noise, and increase our skepticism is worth picking up. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is another alternative, but it is a denser book than the other three titles.
The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block. I’ve ready many of Block’s books. They’re enjoyable and meet “the job I hired them to do” (borrowing from a concept in Christen’s book How will you mearsure you life. I can read the book when I have a few minutes spread over long periods of time and can quickly pick back up the thread of the story. They’re also interesting to imagine how a person like Matthew Scudder can spend so much of his life drinking booze, coffee and sometimes both.