I'm currently going through Clojure Programming (O'Reilly) to try and get into it... so far it's pretty good. I think it's going to take a couple weeks to get to the "AHA" moment, but the language itself makes a lot of sense and is well-explained... it seems like something that could be phenomenally useful once you get over the initial "holy crap, what am I looking at."

It's interesting because I had trouble reading lisp until somebody told me that you don't read lisp by worrying about parentheses, but by reading it as an indentation level aware language. Just like Python.

Here is a more in depth link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1894209/how-to-read-menta...

but the idea is, delete all the parentheses from you mind, the code should still make sense. The parentheses are to help the computer out, not you.

Not necessarily the best strategy, but having ever implemented a parser for a compiler for any "ordinary" language makes lisps much clearer - you're just hand-writing the AST.

There's the entire JVM ecosystem available. Batteries are very much included.