I've read a few books now that are recommended for beginners to Lisp. Someone in the comments of pchristensen's blog recommended the book 'Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation'. I flicked through the first few chapters and for what it's worth it seems pretty good. Also 'Successful Lisp' is pretty good too.
Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/
Successful Lisp: http://psg.com/~dlamkins/Site/sl.html