This is a very nice essay to help people get over their initial problems with Lisp:
http://pavelpenev.posterous.com/learning-lisp-the-bump-free-way
I also just came across an online book called "Successful Lisp", by David B. Lamkins (maybe many of you already know about this):
It's also available from Amazon, in trade paperback (300 pages).
http://www.amazon.com/Successful-Lisp-How-Understand-Common/dp/3937526005/re...
I'm not sure whether we need any more Lisp textbooks now that we have Practical Common Lisp, but it's somehow just nice to know that there are more books about Lisp that managed to get published; at least in the sense that Amazon has it (the web site of the publisher seems to have expired).
-- Dan