Hmm…
When checking out recent Lisp books, I realized that one of the reasons that makes SICP palatable is the fact that it’s “old”. I mean that in a good way. It predates Java, Python, Ruby, etc, and as a result, it does not adopt a smug attitude like, “Lisp is so much better than all these imitators that stole features from it but lack the essence”. Modern Lisp texts often seem to have a hard time keeping this attitude at bay, which makes for unpleasant reading when you’re coming from a different language (which is almost always the case).
Then again, from what I have seen, this attitude is less prevalent in the Scheme community…