I found reading the Art of Computer programming books wasn't that bad. If you ignore the quantative analysis for the algorithms and just look into the algorithm

I found reading the Art of Computer programming books wasn't that bad. If you ignore the quantative analysis for the algorithms and just look into the algorithms themselves then there are a lot of gems in here that you just don't find anywhere else. If you want to learn how to prove the algorithm runtime then there is obviously a lot more to the books, but for finding other algorithms and data structures it is a great tome of options and its organised in a way to just dip into when you have a particular problem. Don't ignore the books on the assumption its too hard as that wasn't my experience of them.