Comment by kevindamm

My first suggestion would be Norvig's text "Artificial Intelligence Programming" (note: not Russel and Norvig's "Modern Approach" but the "Case Studies" one with the teal and orange cover), start with chapter 3 for a straightforward description of the core set of routines (more than a minimal impl but not everything you'd see described in CL) and choose a few from any of the other chapters as a demo program that you can use as a first target for your implementation. Yeah it's GOFAI and might feel dated but it worked well for me to get a stronger grasp of Lisp implementations.

This won't hold your hand through implementing Lisp within another language like C or Rust, but it does show the representation of Lisp within Lisp (and a few chapters on implementing a logic programming language in Lisp as well). Most of the task of transpiling into another language reduces to how you represent functions and function results, and the extent to which your compiler reduces specific built-ins. There's a range of implementation here that you can find covered in PL research papers, but you may be better off looking through compiler books and articles for that.

This book also has a couple chapters on efficiency concerns for implementations of Lisp, chapters 9 and 10, which look at both dev-side and compiler-side approaches to more efficient Lisps.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15534706

Despite the focus on GOFAI, I think the lessons apply to good Lisp programs in general from a practitioner's PoV. If you want a more abstract vantage then I'd say the classic "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Abelson & Sussman should be mentioned. It includes a lot of diagrams of CONS structures to keep things focused but it doesn't have the kind of full case study applications of the Norvig text.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43713

It's funny how all the good books on Lisp implementations assume that first you start with a Lisp. I wonder if this goes back to there being Lisp machines on which the language was already deeply situated.