My first choice is to find an expert and pick their brain to find the stuff I need to read. I hang out in various irc chatrooms. There are usually one or two ex

My first choice is to find an expert and pick their brain to find the stuff I need to read. I hang out in various irc chatrooms. There are usually one or two experts I can bug for references. Alternatively, a good way to find authoritative works in a list like this is to read the references at the back of each book. If most of them refer to the same three or four books you'll want to read those first. You can try looking up the books on wikipedia and seeing what is sad about them.