The most important thing about a font is not if it has ligatures or not. If it does have them then you aught to ask - is this better than not having them - eg is this an improvement? And if it doesn’t, does it suffer from not having them? There are plenty of fonts that have poorly designed ligatures so having ligatures and even larger numbers of ligatures are not a mark of quality per se. Quality has to do with if the font supports reading - this applies to the ligatures as much as any other aspect. Learning which fonts support reading & which ones don’t can take time. The other relevant question has to do with the tone struck by the font when set in text. Of course a good fit with the paper to be used in the book is an issue too.

I must admit ligatures, especially historical forms like st-ligs etc. seem to ba a bit of a flovor of the month/year thing to me, especially since OT. I agree with Eben, ligatures do not improve legibility/readability per se. It’s just that some faces actually need them to set properly, some don’t (which in return doesn’t make either better than the other, per se). To me Ligatures just seem to be a bit of an overestimated topic as of late. Like Eben, i’d choose a typeface rather going by things like content, style, tone/color, and yes, sometimes by era. If you’ve come that far, then you can still look if the font actually includes all the ligatures you might need and if thery’re well drawn. To me giving the sheer number of ligatures first priority in chosing a typeface is like bying a car just because it features an ashtray while others don’t.

Feijoa
http://www.vllg.com/KLIM/Feijoa/mudTyper+Weights/
check the glyphs

I think that for extensive reading text the ligatures you mention