[pjmorris]

The books you've listed are all excellent, but are not direct paths to 'better proficiency through programming close to the hardware'. I believe that SICP might be your best bet from among the books you've listed. Work through it first, then decide where to go next. A caveat: SICP spends much of its time approaching computation from a hardware-independent perspective (expressed in the old quip 'Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes'.) Don Knuth takes almost the opposite approach in 'The Art of Computer Programming', defining a machine language (for an imaginary machine) to be clear about implementation details and time-space tradeoffs. Both perspectives dig much deeper than 'just syntax'.