Mitt liv som Tobin

I'd like to build a radio. Perhaps several. AM then FM. Receiver. It's just something I'd like to learn more about, but also I feel ridiculous with a degree putatively in Electrical Engineering but without having ever constructed any radio device more complicated than a crystal set. It seems like there ought to be a nice book out there somewhere with progressively more sophisticated designs to play with?

One little idea I had was to try to build a clock would listen to and decode the time signals broadcast by NIST; those are on nice integer fixed frequencies, so maybe something simple (with a crystal oscillator) would work? ioerror, Google came up with a link to some neat pictures on your flickr account in response to the query, "homemade fm radio receiver". What's the story behind this nifty little contraption?