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I'd second Gentle Introduction, but only if the reader is willing to actual do all the excersizes in the book. It moves slow and covers less material than other books mentioned, but I found the slow pace and practiced repetion really help the language click for me.

What I found really useful was to work through the excersizes in a proper SLIME setup in Emacs with paredit. Since the excersizes were easy enough I could instead focus on learning to use a proper development setup for working with Lisp.