My own tour of Lisps

Lisp, itself

Lisp has a strange hypnotic fascination. Probably it's all those parenthesis, the idea that commands, expressions and logical concepts have a beginning and an end. They're not clear, but self-enclosed. Selfish, but in a good way. Unfortunately, Lisp is not cool (anymore). List processing (yeah: lis-p) is powerful but is meh as a selling point. And let's be honest: being at ease in Lisp requires to think in a Lisp-y way that isn't immediate.

Also, many Lisp books and tutorials make approaching the language even harder than it should be, because of authors' personal tastes in language platforms and editors or IDEs. My very personal advice is to keep everything simple. First, install SBCL via CLI. Second, ignore all the stuff about "using Lisp in Emacs" if you're not an Emacs lover already (otherwise you'll spend precious time trying to understand Emacs, a thing you can do later). Third, go and play coding.

Clojure

Clojure could be a gentler introduction to Lisps. It's less intimidating than "pure" Lisp because it looks more like a "normal" programming language, for those of us coming from old school imperative languages. This does not mean it's easy, but its learning curve is less steep than Common Lisp's. That said, taking the Clojure road has some pitfalls. Its close relation with Java can be an issue for many - it's been for me - and its REPL debugger is (my opinion) more cryptic than Lisp's.