This might be a bit more practical than your looking for, but it's one of the less dry programming books I've read
http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/
You can buy a copy as a physical/electronic book or use the free web version. It's loosely based on a ( very dry ) book called "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software". Each chapter covers a common pattern that can be applied to game programming. While it includes example code it is also very well described, often with nice hand drawn diagrams. So you can pretty much ignore the code if your not versed in Java and just focus on the ideas.
After reading the chapter on interpreters I was able to create a simple programming language and runtime just based on the books explanation ( not copying code from the book ). This spun off into 2 years of side projects on programming language theory. So it was somewhat of a revelatory book for me.
You may not discover anything particularly relevant to actually writing games using construct in the book, but I'm sure it will help your understanding of how things generally fit together ( or how they should ). The whole idea behind the original "Design Patterns" book was that pretty much every programming solution can be broken down into a small set of patterns, so once you learn the patterns and how to apply them you can solve most issues.