Start with high-confidence historical linguistics books, then narrow by subgenre or adjacent topics.
The Power of Babel
John McWhorter
The Story of Yiddish
Neal Karlen
The Riddle of the Labyrinth
Margalit Fox
The Prodigal Tongue
Lynne Murphy
The Mother Tongue
Bill Bryson
An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language
Walter W. Skeat
The Indo-europeans Rediscovered
J. P. Mallory
Tradition and Modernity in Arabic Language and Literature
J R Smart, Jack Smart
The Development of Greek and the New Testament
Chrys C Caragounis
Syntactical Mechanics
Bruce A. McMenomy
Spanish and Empire
Nelsy Echavez-Solano, Kenya C Dworkin Y Mendez
The Language Wars
Henry Hitchings
The Story of Spanish
Jean-Benoit Nadeau, Julie Barlow
Long Live Latin
Nicola Gardini
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue
Why Q Needs U
Danny Bate
Politics and the Theory of Language in the USSR 1917-1938
Craig Brandist, Katya Chown
A Concise Grammar of the Older Runic Inscriptions
Elmer H. Antonsen
Proto
Laura Spinney
