I've found Practical Common Lisp to be the best book to get me started with CL. It covers the fundamentals nicely but it does everything in the context of real

I've found Practical Common Lisp to be the best book to get me started with CL. It covers the fundamentals nicely but it does everything in the context of real applications so you walk away from the book having actually built something useful. As far as problems to start working on, the best way I've found to learn a language is to start making tools/utilities for myself. Then I'd start learning everything I need to implement that particular tool. Pick a task that you wish was simpler or more automated and write a tool to do that for you.