Have to agree with above. Maxdesign is a great site. His light reading links are alone enough to visit it every day.

Also Eric Meyer's books are excellent. I don't find them stale at all. I also recently read a couple of sitepoint books - "The art and science of css" and "beautiful web design" and can say that these books really helped me see and (try to) build some nice websites. if nothing else they helped me build a process towards designing a site.