I spent quite a while trying to learn Common Lisp and I really wanted to like it, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it. The first problem is finding good learning materials, as most are out of print. On the language side people complain about the parens, which turns out is no big deal. There’s a lot of other weird or needlessly tricky stuff though. The function names are convoluted (e.g. there’s map, but also mapc, mapcan, mapl, maplist). Image based development was interesting, but you might waste an hour debugging because your image diverged from the actual code. Building an actual executable is more complicated than you’d expect, and there’s a lot of magic with packages. There’s some elegance there if you squint, but other lisps are probably better.

I suggest Practical Common Lisp by Seibel https://gigamonkeys.com/book/

I now generate ALL of my hobby projects in CL (SBCL on windows). I tell the LLM to 'over-comment' the code, so I get to learn as I read the output. It has been glorious. I generally use the web browser on an unused port on localhost for user IO (beautiful pages), and the app just hooks to Hunchentoot to serve.

Any 'real' programming language (meaning, one that is truly general purpose: numeric stacks, Web front and back ends, system code, utilities, etc) will always have some cruft. In CL, at least you can understand why some cruft exists. And you get used to it, because it's not like e.g. C where there are some very dark corners indeed. Check out Peter's book!

CL lets you build real apps, for real. No toys. This has value.