CL or Scheme?

I started reading Practical Common Lisp. It took me two whole days to setup a CL system: Emacs, SLIME, CLISP, Quicklisp. The syntax is riddled with intricacies: LET or LET* or FLET or LABLES? Is Scheme (esp. Racket) any better?

Also, is newLISP based on CL, Scheme, or something else? I've had zero difficulty installing and coding it.