Technical books about the intellectual history/evolution of ideas in a technical area make for nice general reading, and I think help give the intellectual big picture that most technical text books do not.

The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge Series on Statistical & Probabilistic Mathematics) Paperback – July 31, 2006 by Ian Hacking

The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century Paperback – May 1, 2002 by David Salsburg

I find Jaynes very readable and useful in the big picture way.