Wow, I'm a little surprised. I took the _exact_ same path all the way up to PAIP. It's eerie to read your thoughts on a blog that isn't yours.<p>Anyway, the CLQR [1] is by far the most useful CL book I've found. It's small enough to print and bind yourself, and the pages on LOOP & the type hierarchy are just pure typography.<p>I recently finished Let Over Lambda (finished the first read-through, anyway), and I almost wish I had started with it. CL is the C of the lambda calculi, but it didn't 'click' until the final chapters of LoL. With a sufficiently smart compiler (and by compiler I mean sets of macros), CL can do damn near anything.<p>ANSI Common Lisp is a great book, too, but I found the chapters oddly arranged (chapters 12,13 need to come first, maybe).<p>[1] <a href="http://clqr.boundp.org/" rel="nofollow">http://clqr.boundp.org/</a>