I also find Axler unbearable. If you are interested specifically in matrices, the book by Denis Serre is quite a masterpiece. And if you are interested in num

I also find Axler unbearable. If you are interested specifically in matrices, the book by Denis Serre is quite a masterpiece. And if you are interested in numerical linear algebra, the book by Tim Davis "Direct Methods for Sparse Linear Solvers" is also extremely beautiful and readable (the goal is not the software implementation in itself, but most of the presented algorithms are illustrated by pseudocode, and some of them even in C).