McWhorter is currently the host of the Lexicon Valley podcast, which I would recommend to anyone interested in language.
I just finished John McWhorter’s What Language Is. It’s excellent, and even though I have a master’s degree in linguistics I learned new things. One of his points is that languages with fewer speakers, with less contact with people who don’t speak the language, and with less of a history of non-native speakers having to learn the language tend to be more complicated. Contact with other languages tends to file off the rough edges of a language. It’s likely that the languages you know are among the simplest of the world’s (approximately) 7,000 languages. It’s quite mistaken to think that obscure languages aren’t used for communication between native speakers of different languages because they are primitive (and hence that their speakers are mere savages). On the contrary, they are more complicated then the languages used by most people, particularly for communication with native speakers, so in one way their culture is considerably more complex.
Thanks for the recommendation - I’ll look for this book. McWhorter makes the same point in his series of lectures called “The Story of Human Language” The Great Courses
I’m not sure if this is the sort of thing you’re looking for, but Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog is a wonderful look at the lost art of sentence diagramming. If you’re old enough to remember diagramming sentences in school as a kid, it will evoke some memories - though whether they are delightful or traumatic will depend on your own history with grammar 
As long as you remember that sentence diagrams (often referred to as Reed-Kellogg diagrams) was already considered hopelessly old-fashioned by most experts in linguistics more than forty years ago. I was a grad student in linguistics at that time. I remember joking with other linguistics grad students about finding some grammatical phenomenon in English that could only be explained by sentence diagrams and submitting an article about it to a linguistics journal. We considered this hilarious.
After retirement I worked a few years in a University of Alaska library, just setting at an exit and checking out books, and during the numerous long lulls I enjoyed a lot of time browsing the many linguistic books with ‘Oxford’ in the title.
I second/third the mentions of Crystal above. And not just because he was a professorial fellow of the university where I got my linguistics degree and signed my books for me. There were some of my old professors I wouldn’t necessarily wish to point you towards…
A Mouthful of Air* is a worthwhile read and it’s Anthony Burgess wearing his linguist hat this time.
Jeez, I completely forgot about this thread. I did end up buying pinkmans language instinct but I’ve not read past the introductory bit. I bought the undivided past by david cannadine shortly afterwards which has sucked up my time.