I heartily endorse Lisp In Small Pieces. It's sitting beside me right now.

I recently wrote an assembler in scheme; I'm in the process of adding macros. You need very few primitives to implement what amounts to a lisp compiler. A larger issue is bootstrapping garbage collection from manual memory allocation—while there are a few tricks to do this simply, if inefficiently, high-performance garbage collection needs to be tightly integrated with the compiler in order to implement a) scanning for roots, b) rewriting pointers when you move allocations around, and c) likely pointer tagging. None of this is easy to design around or to bolt on to a macro-oriented compiler-assembler.

And of course, writing the really fancy bits of lisp—escaping closures, continuations, conditions—take a lot more effort and thought and care.

Curiously, garbage collection is far from necessary to achieve bootstrapping. It's just rather odd to use a lisp with manual memory allocation. I've found stealing from Rust's memory model has been very fruitful in this regard (not the borrow checker). RAII is also very easy to implement with careful attention to how scoping and moving is implemented.