The best way I found to see past the parens is to simply start writing some lisp. I recently started teaching myself by working through the problems on 4clojur

The best way I found to see past the parens is to simply start writing some lisp. I recently started teaching myself by working through the problems on 4clojure.com, reading pg's _On Lisp_, and books like _Land of Lisp_, _Programming Clojure_, _Joy of Clojure_, etc., and even within a day or two of learning I found I no longer saw the syntax at all. In fact, one of the great beauties of Lisp and s-expressions is that the syntax is so so minimal and so consistent that it all but disappears. (Clojure is a bit more complicated, in that it introduces additional special forms for java interop, metadata, vectors and maps, but you get used to that quickly, too.) A much trickier thing for me personally has been memorizing what all of the standard functions do, particularly bouncing back and forth between common lisp and clojure like I've been. Clojuredocs.org and the clojure source code itself have been essential companions in this journey. So the only thing holding you back is the parens, then have no fear, you'll actually grow to love them (especially if you're an emacs user, thanks to show-paren-mode and electric-pair-mode and the like).