Which books are you reading fellow beginner lispers? I'm reading "A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation" the 2013 version. You can find the 1990 version here https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/ for free. So far it's pretty good. I'm currently on the 7th chapter and I'd argue there are a couple of exercises asking you to do something which wasn't covered in the book and also there are a couple of "weird" behaviors, even if you lookup the answers you'll still get strange results, so either that's because of implementation changes (even though I'm reading the 2013 edition, the book mostly uses everything from the 1990 version) or the questions weren't asked properly. Overall I'd still recommend it, it taught me all the basics and MOST exercises are fun to implement. What got me into this book was this article https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/ which I found very helpful. Originally I wanted to go through https://teachyourselfcs.com/ but SICP was a bit too challenging for me so I figured I'd check the language first before diving into SICP. After browsing countless websites I came to the conclusion that CL has larger documentation and that it has more vast resources for learning compared to Scheme and I figured that it wouldn't be too hard to hop back from CL to Scheme or vice versa. Nowadays I'm thinking after finishing this book to go through "Practical Common Lisp", basically do what the "a road to common lisp" article suggests, maybe after that I'll try to translate SICP to CL.