If you’ve ever wondered how people use numbers to express the world in the way they want it seen, these two books are incredibly good at explaining how they do it, and how you can do it too!   (No fair them having all the fun!)

Even if you never buy either of these, at least go to a local bookstore and flip through them.   It is a fascinating education into how people twist numbers and how they are presented to make them mean, well, anything!

How to Lie With Charts

A great book on how to convince people that anything you say it true, because “you can see it is right here”.   By carefully choosing the right presentation for the information, you can make numbers look like they support almost any position.   It’s amazing how simply choosing the right graphing style can make the information look completely different.

It goes very well with the similarly insightful book:

How to Lie With Statistics

Which says how to tweak numbers in different ways to sound more convincing, no matter what side of an argument you might be on.

Great reads if you want to see how people try to manipulate you and your opinions every day.