alt Hacker NewsSICP, as beautiful and good as it is, is probably responsible for a large amount of the misconceptions and negative thoughts about Lisp. SICP isn't a Lisp book, it's a Scheme book, and the Scheme culture is at least as different to Lisp (Common Lisp and its ancestors all the way back to McCarthy) as Java is to Python.
I know both CL and Scheme, thanks. And both philosophies overlap a lot. Heck, there's an Scheme interpreter in PAIP as en exercise...
I'd woudn't consider SICP negative, the same with all the good CL books (Intro to Symbolic Computation, Paradigms of AI Programming...)
Both are the ur-examples on how to grasp the basic of CS well.