Common Lisp is an ancestor of LISP and is more active every year. It puts its eggs in a "pragmatism" basket. Very good introductory book "Practical Common Lisp" by Peter Seibel[1].

Scheme is a lisp made from scratch. It bets on clarity, functional programming, minimalism and elegance. There is a perfect introductory book "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"[2] which is a worth read even if you don't want to program in Scheme in the future.

I haven't used Clojure, but from what I've heard it's a modern functional lisp which bets on parallelism and interop between environments.

There are more lisp dialects like PicoLisp, but I know about them even less than about the Clojure, so you'll have to investigate options by yourself. I'm a Common Lisp programmer, so I can recommend that – "the profound enlightenment experience", as Eric Raymond put it.

[1] http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

[2] https://www.mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

I would also advocate for Racket as a great option and is very active. https://racket-lang.org/

I know that Racket is so much more right now, but I've put it in the "Scheme box" in my mind. Is it technically incorrect to treat Racket as Scheme on batteries?

Absolutely. It really is "A Programing Language for Programing Languages" It is an excellent environment for defining well contained scheme subsets and other languages and using them seamlessly. But Racket has become its own beast and is very different from Scheme now and the reason for the name change from Scheme PTL.

In a lot of ways, Clojure feels like the python of lisps. It pretends (very well I must say) to be dead simple but lets you get into "the nitty gritty details of programming" as another commenter put it, if you need to/know how.

> Common Lisp is an ancestor of LISP

You probably mean a descendant

yeah, my mistake. Thanks :)