It's new to me as well, although I heard about it a long time ago, I only read The Essential Kabbalah and God is a Verb last summer. Paulist Press has some good books on it too.
I've read several books. One that was helpful as an overview . . . I'll have to find the title. Kabbalah seems to draw many from the New Age scene that want to recover some form of theism but without Christian or traditional Jewish trappings; it seems to be considered, roughly speaking, the esoteric mystical system of Judaism, or one aspect of it, perhaps not unlike Sufism but without a broadly recognized place in orthodoxy.
