brettechapin 's review for:

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter

1.0

---

I finally finished this awful book! I honestly only finished it because I have a compulsive need to finish every book I start. I thought this book was going to be this beautiful interweaving of art and math and it was mostly just math. I think some of the connections are actually there, but the way the author expresses those connections makes them feel forced and pedantic. He seems to think he's very clever, and he probably is, but he also comes across as arrogant. He breaks up his pontificating with dialogues, while are thinly veiled pontificating by his characters. He is truly bad at creating dialogues, and those also come out feeling forced and awkward. I found a few topics enjoyable in this book, but the parts I liked were only a paragraph or two at a time, spread thinly throughout 700+ pages of overly intellectualized babbling.