Reddit reviews Minerals of the World (Princeton Field Guides)

Check out the Princeton Field Guide. It's really nice and around $20. If you're looking for the spiritual side of things, I don't have the know-how to provide a recommendation but if you're interested in the mineral themselves you may like it. It has lots of beautiful images and the descriptions are really good. They'll tell you the environments where they form, what their crystal systems look like, how they tend to break (you'll want to know that for drilling your holes and such - I imagine you'd drill perpendicular to cleavage for less fracture).

As far as fancy rock names, you'll just put that together with experience. You can pick up an old edition Earth by Tarbuck for $10 online and that'll tell you all of your basics and from there you can easily branch out.

It can be confusing and frustrating at first, but just keep at it and it'll all come together with some experience. I can recommend things for days, but those books really helped me get a grip on the variety.

If you have any other questions, I'm super happy to help!

Princeton: http://www.amazon.com/Minerals-World-Princeton-Field-Guides/dp/069109537X

Earth: http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Introduction-Physical-Geology-8th/dp/0131148656/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407769493&sr=1-9&keywords=earth+tarbuck

I recommend Minerals of the World by Ole Johnsen. I had to get this as a required text for my mineralogy class. It has mineral tables in the back, grouped by metallic/nonmetallic luster and ordered by hardness in order of softest to hardest. Also in the tables is the page number the main entry is on, so once you've identified the mineral, you can compare it to pictures in the text and view other information on it, such as economic importance. It's also cheap, so it'll set you back less than $20.00 on Amazon.

Hope this helped!