I agree with you. I believe the university textbooks are no good either as they are too far away from the real market. DO you believe that financial history books or even just history books with financial materials might actually be better?
I once read the "Reminiscence Of A Stock Operator" and my edition happens to include large paragraphs of description of the market at that time, and they are really fascinating and I felt that I learnt a lot.
There’s a certain amount of baseline knowledge in university books that is very helpful such as MPT, DDM, DCF, bond prices vs yields, theoretical relationship between rates and equities, no arbitrage pricing theory, etc.
It really depends on the book. The main issue regarding historical books is that they can very easily become dated.
I've also read Reminiscence of a Stock Operator and I found that, while interesting, very little of that informs how the market works nowadays. It did shine a light on why TA is still a thing nowadays - a flavour of TA used to work historically and you can still see echoes of that today.
I once read the "Reminiscence Of A Stock Operator" and my edition happens to include large paragraphs of description of the market at that time, and they are really fascinating and I felt that I learnt a lot.