Lisp has a strange hypnotic fascination. Probably it’s for all those parenthesis, the idea that commands, expressions and therefore logical concepts have a beginning and an end. They’re not clear, but self-enclosed. Selfish, but in a good way.
Unfortunately, Lisp is not a fashionable programming language anymore. List processing (yeah: lis-p) today seems kinda meh as a selling point. Until you realize that in Lisp everything is a list, therefore list processing means the ability to process anything, code included. That said, let’s be honest: being at ease in Lisp requires to think in a Lisp-y way that can’t be defined “immediate”.
Also, most of the official/popular books on Lisp aren’t that welcoming and this doesn’t help. The most effective textbook is probably “Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation” (PDF link). And the need to specify that it’s a “gentle introduction” means something. By the way, it’s actually gentle, I’m able to confirm that.
Many Lisp book and tutorials make approaching the language even harder than it should be, essentially for the author’s personal tastes in language platforms and editors or IDEs. My very personal advice is to keep everything simple.
Lisp is my favourite programming language, for pet projects. Using it is fun and quite rewarding, for desktop applications as much as for embedded systems (see Arduino). It won’t make you rich and neither the star of your next developers dinner. But it’s really worth a try. And, probably, a good first step to the strange world of modern-ish functional programming.