Here is a rather select list of books that may be of interest to the philologist. By and large these should not require specialized knowledge; I have not included technical works on linguistics, for example. I have not divided them into categories; it will be obvious that some are most relevant to a particular aspect of philology, but others are of more general application.
Auerbach, Erich. 2003. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Barber, Charles. 2000. The English Language: A Historical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barfield, Own. 1953. History in English Words. London: Faber & Faber.
Croll, Morris. 1966. Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Curtius, E. R. 1953. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Empson, William. 1966. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York: New Directions.
Empson, William. 1952. The Structure of Complex Words. Chatto & Windus.
Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lass, Roger. 1997. Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lewis, C. S. 1990. Studies in Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Olson, David R. 1994. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, Jeremy. 1996. An Historical Study of English: Function, Form, and Change. London: Routledge.
Reynolds, L. D. and N. G. Wilson. 1991. Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek & Latin Literature. Third Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Steiner, George. 1975. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vickers, Brian. 1990. In Defence of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vickers, Brian. 1989. Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry. With a New Preface and Annotated Bibliography. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Watkins, Calvert. 1995. How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williamson, George. 1966. The Senecan Amble: Prose from Bacon to Collier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wills, Garry. 1992. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. New York: Simon & Schuster.
The Art of Reading Slowly 