When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?
I encountered Lisp through Emacs. I encountered Emacs after having acquired a UNIX account at the university back in something like 1988. Switch Date 1990s
What led you to try Lisp?
It is very difficult to be a serious Emacs hacker without being thoroughly exposed to Lisp. As I tend to get very enthusiastic about powerfull technology, I took Emacs hacking very seriously and it is not possible (as far as I know) to actually use Lisp seriously before reaching the point of no return. RtL Emacs Elisp
How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
I would rate myself as a competent Lisp programmer. I know my way around the hyperspec and feel comfortable with all the entries in table of contents. I have some 8000 lines in my .emacs file and have even worked professionally with Common Lisp for a couple of years.
I have however still a long way to go. I still need to experiment a lot in order to get `reduce' to do what I want and I have yet to truly understand how Henry Bakers META parser works. I also need to write more code in order to build up my sense of code layout and program structure.
What do you think of Lisp so far?
Lisp is the most sophisticated programming language I know. It is literally decades ahead of the competition.