Highly recommend "Doing Data Science" (it's on list provided in the link above). The guest-lecture style chapters keep the material interesting (the author based this book on a class she taught at Columbia University) and as someone who was reading this part-time (alone), I enjoyed working on the exercises that are listed in the later chapters.
If you're interested in python, my wife says good things about "Python for Data Analysis." Supposedly quite readable and practical.