Paperback: The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver (Penguin, £8.99)

Nate Silver is a statistician — he looks for patterns and tries to use these patterns to predict the future.

He’s most famous for “calling” the last US election — most people thought it would be closer than it was but Silver could see that Obama would win quite easily.

He’s also good at understanding baseball and the way markets work. How does he do this? Well, he says, we are saturated with information. This tends to lead us astray. The trick is to see that a small amount of information is important and a great deal is misleading.

Silver tells you how to focus on what’s important. It’s not just a good statistical analysis. It’s a life lesson.