[silentbicycle]

First, it's not a bad idea to find a project you can work on with another person or two - a lot of the BBM character weaknesses are consequences of being independent even when it's a net loss. In some sense, this is an echoed in some Lisp systems that try to be Lisp "all the way down", rather than inter-operating with existing systems. Rewriting an entire software stack can be pretty quixotic, and at the very least distracts from whatever you set out to do initially.

If you want to learn Lisp (and I'm not sure - I may hear a hint of sarcasm), the book _The Little Schemer_ (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/) is a good starting point. It's a quick read, and will walk you through several of the big ideas in a (somewhat minimalistic) dialect of Lisp called Scheme. Whether you'd be happier using Scheme, Common Lisp, or some other Lisp dialect in the long run is hard to say, but you can get through that book in a weekend, and the main ideas it covers will apply to all Lisps. (You might find the style excessively cute, but it's short.)

_SICP_ (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) is absolutely worth reading as well, but really working through it will take much longer. It too uses Scheme, but covers several big ideas in programming that transcend specific languages. (I recommend _The Art of Prolog_ for the same reason.)