Animation of Electric Machines

Both are great, I suspect I'm going to sink countless hours into them.

Electric Machinery Fundamentals Stephen J. Chapman

This was the book we used in undergraduate, It was quite readable as I remember.

I saw a recommendation for the Art of Electronics by Paul Horowitz on here a while ago.

for ac machines, langsdorf.

Your best bet is college textbooks. This one is good: http://epp.etf.rs/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Fitzgerald_E...

https://www.amazon.com/Electrical-Technology-H-Cotton-ebook/... an older edition of this was my textbook back in the day. You can only understand motors with this book. You'll also need a textbook on power electronics to learn how to supply them electricity. Maybe a textbook on control systems to learn how to control them.

Electric Motors and Drives[0] is very good. Not very mathematical, and gives a lot of intuition. If you understand basic electronics and can do arithmetic you can follow most of the book. Some parts are harder than others but if you keep going it will eventually make sense.

Edit: I took a look at some of the other books people recommended and they seem more advanced, this book is easier than them and probably better for someone without an EE background. I am not sure how to best learn electronics (I learned from The Art of Electronics, but that is probably not the easiest way to learn, and probably overkill for just learning how motors work.)

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Electric-Motors-Drives-Fundamentals-A...

Less on machines on more on basic concepts, may I recommend a physics site that is spiritually related to this website, in that it is also clear, simple, and in many ways a work of passion for teaching? http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/emcon.html#emcon

Starting from roughly zero, I'd recommend this page and its neighbours:

http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Workshop/advice/coils/force.html

I think any subject will be much deeper than your current superficial language of it is once you dive into it; the STEM fields are one of course, but otoh there's for example my girlfriend who is / was a gardener, which is something many people pull their noses up at because it's just menial work involving a shovel and a lawnmower right? Except it's not, you get to deal with the wonderful worlds of soil composition, soil ecosystems, drainage / hydraulics, microbiology, entomology, lots of Latin, geometry and measurements, and in her case, running a business as well so financial administration and tax laws and the like.

TL;DR I think you vastly underestimate other fields of study because you've never looked into or considered them. I get that you're in awe of this particular page and want to express it, but be aware that you kinda come across as dismissive of everything that isn't electrical engineering or your own particular field of study.

Power engineering is vast. Machinery, generation/transmission/distribution, high voltage are the main topics. They're very much intertwined with each other so maybe it's pointless to divide it into topics. Of course it's still part of the broader electrical engineering subject.