The Joy Of book, but with more familiarity than last time I tackled it (and fell flat on my face!)
I am facing the same problem. I tend to run into that problem, because the moment I see some non regular programming aspect being discussed at length it becomes a little boring. Also I can't co relate that with my practical experiences.
I enjoyed functional programming thanks to Mark Jason Dominus's "Higher Order Perl". Which taught me all functional programming stuff in the most pragmatic way out.
Now that is what I look for, material that teaches me all this great stuff in the framework of my real work. Then it becomes really enjoyable and graspable.
Just glancing through, these look like great problems to tackle while learning any new language, and I might have a go at just that - translating them to clojure, and looking at docs as I go. If you're interested in doing something similar, my mail is my name at gmail. (You probably know the material a lot better than I though!)
I've found a multi book approach to be helpful. Safari online has both Practical Clojure and The Joy of Clojure available. Manning has Clojure in Action -- with the ebook version including drm free mobi, ePub, and PDF versions.
This is the first lisp that has started to click for me.
http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html
..to been a nice soft introduction. Now I'm intending to go through The Joy Of book, but with more familiarity than last time I tackled it (and fell flat on my face!).
Yes, it's dry, but it's also very straightforward. Using the repl in another window while looking it over was key though. It really does become much more clear what's going on when you manually type everything out, and then poke bits of it with a stick until it clicks.