There are a number of interesting places to start, if you want to be traditional start with reading about the Standard Model, if you want to be avant-garde start reading about String Theory :-).

I have come at the question a bit like you have, starting with Faraday and Maxwell for the electromagnetic theory, adding Lorentz and Einstein for the time and space dilation effects of general relativity. And when you start looking at light as an expanding wavefront alternating between a magnetic form and a electrostatic form and thinking about how the frequency of that oscillation relates to the other fundamental constants in the universe like the speed of light and the planck constant, you might start to wonder, as I have, whether a wavefront at the speed of light would mass appear as a side effect because it was distorting space time so hard it was dragging it around?

Its a lot of fun to think about.