Well to offer a counter perspective, i began and tried to learn lisp with Common Lisp and Seibel's "Practical Common Lisp" book. I got totally overwhelmed by the sum and quantity of knowledge to absorb, and by the fact that finding libraries to do "fun" things was very difficult.
Then i tried clojure (with netbeans which has at the time quite a easy IDE integration that allowed me to not focus too much on the java side of things, unlike using clojure on the command line was at the time). I used it first to solve some project Eulers problems, and then began toying with some libs, notably QT Jambi, swing, compojure, etc. All this to say that learning it was a lot easier than learning Common Lisp, because at the time i began, it was a lot simpler language than Common Lisp. It still is, but i wonder if the protocols thing is not gonna considerably complicate a noob's approach to the language.
My advice to clojure newbies is, start with an IDE that makes it easy to interact with libraries and let you concentrate on the code, not on the ugly java stuff. You will have plenty of time to handle that later on if you really enjoy clojure ;)