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 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.