People often ask me if I reccomended any books, or have some kind of Bibliography or library I would reccomend to students and dojo members
When it comes to "martial arts" books with picture of techniques and "how to do it" pics, I blanket advise to avoid all of them
The 2 Martial Arts books I reccomend to read are
The Tao of Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee
And
Go Rin No Sho by Miyamoto Musahi - for those who still haven't bothered to learn to read Japanese yet you can get the English translation The Book Of Five Rings
These are deep enough to keep you going for a couple of years, each one written by a genius and the only real written work each one ever did (don't consider those early weird Bruce books compiled by his junior students after his death a real books, everything really relevant was collated by Linda and Dan and put into the Tao)
We directly use the concepts written about in these books at STMA, and you actually have to read of and spend time thinking about it, rather than looking at pretty pictures of techniques
AVOID The Art Of War by Sun Tzu - it is totally irrelevant, completely overrated, and its overrated by people with no knowledge of martial Art or Warfare, eg Krav Maga knuckle fuckers. Most of the "famous" quotes are actually mis quotes, the same way as people who quote Nostradamus have never read him and are misquoting him. Chapter 13, the use of spies, has fuck all to do with Ninjas, despite what people seem to think. Ninjutsu is a Japanese phenomonum. No Japanese Ninja clan Jonin in the 14th century had access to the translated paper back version of this Chinese "classic". Musashi never read it either.
Beyond that I would reccomend 2 new books by genius mathematician Dr Stephen Blake.
The first is called Reincarnation Refuted and mathematically proves that Reincarnation can't happen, and provides algorithms to explain karma. It's in opposition to a lot of what I encountered during my time in the Far East, where everyone is into either Hinduism, Buddhism, or Shinto, so all follow lives based on karma and the concepts of reincarnation, the way Christians in the western world follow the concept of doing good to go to heaven. A fascinating subject if you feel inclined.
Beyond that, the math formulaes and the use of applied maths in physics, the laws of thermodynamics are referenced heavily, and we talk a lot about that in class, especially the concept of entropy in Kempo sequences and karate kata
