I love that book, but I have to agree with you: it's intended to teach Lisp, not programming. If you don't already know how to program, you probably won't learn programming or Lisp from PCL. Instead, you're likely to get turned off to both.

The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is a great book for learning the fundamentals of programming. It happens to use Scheme, a dialect of Lisp. If you want an academic introduction to programming, it's one of the best. I haven't found anything as good that takes a more pragmatic "let's build something useful/fun and learn to program in the process" approach, but I bet someone else here has.