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SICP - this book is intended for beginners, since those who are advanced enough will only be wasting their time reading this book.
If you're a beginner, starting with SICP is like discussing the next major physics theory without learning any physics. You'll learn to philosophize and throw around grand but meaningless ideas.
Starting with C and Assembler is a better way. You'll learn the internals first, find out what's behind the abstractions. You'll know how procedures are actually called, and what some of the issues are.
In fact, towards the end of chapter 4, the authors themselves admit that their simplistic view of computers and languages is severely deficient if they want to descirbe things properly, so in charter five they introduce register machines.
No wonder so many students I've talked with complained. They couldn't understand what all of this encapsulation meant, since they had no idea of the basic underlying process--simple pushes onto a stack and jmp instructions. The way they presented structures such trees and lists, with pairs, is also a very braindead approach. C pointers are much more intuitive and flexible.
Aside from the book's wrong approach, it's also terribly written. I tired to like it, but books can only be so boring before you start to feel aversion towards it.
The book promises to make a better programmer out of you, to teach you how to think about programs, but this promise is not kept.
Those things which it presents that are relevant to overall philosophy of programming are already widely known as it is. The other things they present are completely useless. In short, you will not gain any valuable insight and won't see any revelations or any radical and vastly superior methods of thinking about programs. It's just mundane drivel here.