One approach is to go to the MIT OpenCourseWare website, look for the economics department, and look at their reading lists.
Of course, that's going to be mostly academic reading (textbooks, etc.). But if you want to learn the basics, it's probably safer to start there than the pop econ books (and I would dispense with most heterodox reading before you're able to assess them within a larger framework).
Two good books that haven't been mentioned here:
Economic Theory in Retrospect, by Mark Blaug. Very useful to get a good historical grounding in the main ideas that compose today's orthodox economics.
The Applied Theory of Pirce, by McCloskey. Your usual microeconomics textbook, but far more thorough, insisting a lot on grasping the intuition behind the concepts. Available for free from the author's website here: http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/price.pdf
I am very glad this is the top voted answer. Forget investing books and blogs and whatever. All worthless junk. Read the accounting textbooks and figure out valuations. Then you can figure out trading with your stats skills.
A couple of good youtube channels though! Martin Shkreli's channel and Aswath Damodaran.
Then some books might be beneficial to you but you yourself can be the judge of that. Everybody thinks they get finance and economics. They don't.
This is a ridiculous statement, especially when combined with the implication that some amateur will be able to "trade", successfully, with a bit of statistical knowledge. The fundamentals of economics and finance are stored in books. If you're starting out, you have a long way to go before you can no longer learn from them.
I do agree with your recommendations for sites. But you're going to get far more out of Prof. Damodaran's "worthless junk" textbook than you will his blog.
There's quite the difference between a textbook and an investing book. If you read my comment again, you will notice that I recommend getting textbooks.
Damodaran's Corporate Finance is a textbook. Taleb's books and any other "philosophy of investing" are junk. Some philosophy of investing books provide some value but only after the reader already has quite the knowledge and experience.
tl;dr - Read the curriculum, not amazon's top section.
I just checked Shkreli's channel and it is like a breath of fresh air (never imagined that I'd say something like that about Shkreli). The way he starts to talk about the finance and investing as a career choice - a skill that you sell to other people, instead of trying to money by investing your own money, is surprisingly rare angle in any popular take on investing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARrNYyJEnFI
He's really, really good, and he is millennial enough that he happily spends hours live streaming the minutia of how he assembles spreadsheets to evaluate a company.
He often does a phone in where you can call him and discuss basically anything you like. There are hours of him patiently and openly discussing drug pricing, racism and economics with random people on YouTube.
Of course, that's going to be mostly academic reading (textbooks, etc.). But if you want to learn the basics, it's probably safer to start there than the pop econ books (and I would dispense with most heterodox reading before you're able to assess them within a larger framework).
Two good books that haven't been mentioned here:
Economic Theory in Retrospect, by Mark Blaug. Very useful to get a good historical grounding in the main ideas that compose today's orthodox economics.
The Applied Theory of Pirce, by McCloskey. Your usual microeconomics textbook, but far more thorough, insisting a lot on grasping the intuition behind the concepts. Available for free from the author's website here: http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/price.pdf