The first baby step that I'd recommend would be to read "
QED" by Richard Feynman. It is short, cogent, and builds good intuition for more advanced treatments. It is also more factually accurate and less speculative than many other popular physics books. Unlike many books that focus on what isn't known, he focuses on what we know already. You could finish it in a weekend (it is basically a transcription, edited, of a four lecture series he presented to educated lay people).
The next intermediate step I'd recommend would be to read to review articles available online from the
Particle Data Group and the Wikipedia article related to the
Standard Model of Particle Physics, the
List of Mesons, the
List of Baryons, and all of the articles linked in those articles, which will give you a broader framework of the discipline and its history. Learn the nomenclature for hadrons (which
one of the PDG review articles explains). Reading
Matt Strassler's blog and website, which also has some progressively more advanced review posts on these issues, would also be a good second step.
After that, I would recommend regularly reading new HEP publications at
arXiv in the four categories under that heading (Experiment is the best to start with if you have limited time, and are reading just one), and following the websites of the major particle collider collaborations (like ATLAS, GlueX, and BESIII), and major physics conferences (like
Moriond).
The next step woulds be to buy the most relevant textbook you can find at your local college bookstore for self-study and to work through it.
With that under your belt, you'll have a better idea about what you should do next.
