You might find Jan Gullberg's _Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers_ helpful - it's a big book, but it's fairly light reading. Instead of a dense book of prob

You might find Jan Gullberg's _Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers_ helpful - it's a big book, but it's fairly light reading. Instead of a dense book of problems, proofs, exercises, etc., it gives an overview of the different kinds of math, their historical context, what kinds of problems they're good at solving, etc. More the 'what' and 'why' than 'how'. It might help you get a better sense of what you're more interested in learning. (You might really like probability and statistics but not trig, for example.) You can probably find a copy for under $10, and a decent public library is likely to have it as well. I've had a lot of fun with Project Euler (http://projecteuler.net/ http://projecteuler.net/), a math puzzle website for programmers, though it's not clear from your post whether you're also into programming or not. Also, another hard part of learning math is the notation. There's no getting around that. The Gullberg book will introduce it, but it won't drill it into you the way working through exercise problems will.