My beloved husband pitched up at home a couple of nights ago bearing gifts – a bottle of champagne and a copy of Information is Beautiful by David McCandless. He knows the way to my heart: data visualization is one of my favourite subjects.

Information is Beautiful is indeed a lovely book. I learnt all kinds of interesting new things reading it. Black-market prices for personal online information and the routes through which such information leaks; probabilities of dying from different causes; visualisations of the human body by nerve endings versus insurance values; a Peters projection of the world superimposed on a Mercator projection. The range of subjects and the creativity of their visualisations is tremendous.

I think it's actually a distinct sub-genre of books about data, more like a factual version of a graphic novel than a text about how to display statistical data. In this latter category I have some other firm favourites: Edward Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Beautiful Evidence; and Howard Wainer's Picturing the Uncertain World and Graphic Discovery: A Trout in the Milk and Other Visual Adventures. This entire subject is growing encouragingly, however. Hans Rosling's Gapminder has become widely used for the presentation of scatter plots (health against GDP for many countries) over time. (Here's a chronology of the discipline. There's loads of software available – I'd love to know if any of you have particular favourites.)

Information is Beautiful is distinct from these. Whereas the Tufte/Wainer tradition aims to present underlying statistical truths in such a way that they can be taken in at a glance, McCandless turns statistics into narrative accounts. Some of his graphics need careful reading to interpret the message. This doesn't make them inferior, just serving a different purpose. And part of that purpose is engaging more people in understanding what data can tell us about the world, a mission wholeheartedly to be encouraged.