After you've been writing it for a while, reading Lisp / Clojure at a glance is not nearly as scary as it seems at first. You get used to it, and that one-liner becomes a paragon of elegant simplicity rather than a strange collection of symbols.
It's just a different mode of scanning than what we've become accustomed to by working in mainly ALGOL-derived languages. With practice, it becomes second nature (and ALGOLs seem needlessly verbose by comparison :)
I've tried unsuccessfully to learn the zen of Lisp.
When you read a Lisp one liner, to me it seems like there are many implicit details you have to hold in your head. "Ok after this parenthesis now you have a list of maps keyed by symbols with string values. Ok go up one parenthesis and now it's transformed to a list of maps with..." Continue unwrapping for 3 levels. Get messaged by coworker. "Ok. Where was I? Fuck."
Rich Hickey said something along the lines of "If a function only deals with mutability in local variables (for performance), it's still a pure function". I prefer reading imperative functions that are still pure in that sense and spell out each transformation line by line to reading highly compact code written in powerful languages. Maybe I'm just dumb.
Why dumb? Perhaps you only need longer time to adapt to the new status... until the new way to structure the code becomes your default way to present functions.
Writing is the key, I wrote in 10 programming languages and lisp still looked alien to me. It was only once I was forced to write out examples in a programming languages class that it started making sense. You really have to try writing in something novel like a lisp dialect to assess whether or not it makes sense!
It's just a different mode of scanning than what we've become accustomed to by working in mainly ALGOL-derived languages. With practice, it becomes second nature (and ALGOLs seem needlessly verbose by comparison :)