> I find lisp impenetrable and parenthetical soup

I think part of this is the somewhat idiosyncratic indenting style, where closing parens are gathered together instead of their own line like curly brackets in C-style syntax. It ends up being somewhat similar to python, in that if a lisp program is indented "properly" you should be able to ignore the pileup of closing parens that tend to happen at the end of a long expression, and even the open parens, and see the structure for what it is.

I found that Parinfer's introduction helped me a ton in this regard <https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/>