Lisp from Nothing, Second Edition

Under “The Intended Audience” (page 10 of the PDF sample on the site), it says that this is not an introduction to LISP and that it would be more enjoyable with some prerequisites.

Where does one — who has no knowledge of these prerequisites or about LISP (except that the latter has been heard in programming circles as something esoteric, extremely powerful, etc.) — start, before reading this book?

When I was a beginner, A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation worked for me. As the title suggests, it gently introduces concepts in a very beginner friendly manner, so even macros are easy enough to grasp by the time you get there. The diagrams and examples are great.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/book.pdf