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A review by explodinghead
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
4.0
This is a book about logic and hierarchies.
Because I got ahead of my reading schedule, I decided to finally dive into GODEL, ESCHER, BACH. I've wanted to ever since reading D.T. Max's biography of David Foster Wallace, where descriptions of the book (and Wallace's thoughts on it) sounded incredibly interesting. After reading about it, I feel like I would always hear it come up in conversations, as one of those mind-bending, life-changing, treatises that would take you on a psychedelic journey.
Well, I read ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE, which promises similar things, and I hated that book, so GEB went to the backburner.
But I finally got around to it, in all of its 740-packed pages of glory. My first impression upon finishing: man, a lot of people have been pretending to read this book. Half of what you hear is that GODEL ESCHER BACH is about how a mathematician/logicist (Kurt Godel), a visual artist (M.C. Escher), and a baroque composer (J.S. Bach) all deal in these fundamental threads of humanity -- because their works are recursive, it speaks to the fields of art, science, and math, and the human condition. This book has almost NONE of that featured between its covers. This is a book primarily about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, and some of its long-reaching impact, and Bach and Escher are just kind of along for the ride to help illustrate some of these points.
At 740 pages, I began to get bored about halfway through. I just felt overloaded. The examples Hofstadter gives required me to break out pen-and-paper at times, and while some of the little fables/fugues he allows between chapters make for easy reading, most of the actual content of this book reads like a textbook. Granted, GEB is a well-written, witty, and enjoyable textbook, but a textbook nonetheless.
There were a few chapters that felt out of place (one of DNA, another on neurons), and some of the information was overkill, but that's because Hofstadter is in love with this material. He was probably too close to it, and an editor probably should have told him to slim some of this down. But, the editor probably had the same reaction I did: "Uh, yeah man, I'm with you. Keep going, and I may catch up."
I'll be thinking about GODEL ESCHER BACH for quite some time, but I can think of maybe 2 other people in my life that I would earnestly recommend it to.
Because I got ahead of my reading schedule, I decided to finally dive into GODEL, ESCHER, BACH. I've wanted to ever since reading D.T. Max's biography of David Foster Wallace, where descriptions of the book (and Wallace's thoughts on it) sounded incredibly interesting. After reading about it, I feel like I would always hear it come up in conversations, as one of those mind-bending, life-changing, treatises that would take you on a psychedelic journey.
Well, I read ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE, which promises similar things, and I hated that book, so GEB went to the backburner.
But I finally got around to it, in all of its 740-packed pages of glory. My first impression upon finishing: man, a lot of people have been pretending to read this book. Half of what you hear is that GODEL ESCHER BACH is about how a mathematician/logicist (Kurt Godel), a visual artist (M.C. Escher), and a baroque composer (J.S. Bach) all deal in these fundamental threads of humanity -- because their works are recursive, it speaks to the fields of art, science, and math, and the human condition. This book has almost NONE of that featured between its covers. This is a book primarily about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, and some of its long-reaching impact, and Bach and Escher are just kind of along for the ride to help illustrate some of these points.
At 740 pages, I began to get bored about halfway through. I just felt overloaded. The examples Hofstadter gives required me to break out pen-and-paper at times, and while some of the little fables/fugues he allows between chapters make for easy reading, most of the actual content of this book reads like a textbook. Granted, GEB is a well-written, witty, and enjoyable textbook, but a textbook nonetheless.
There were a few chapters that felt out of place (one of DNA, another on neurons), and some of the information was overkill, but that's because Hofstadter is in love with this material. He was probably too close to it, and an editor probably should have told him to slim some of this down. But, the editor probably had the same reaction I did: "Uh, yeah man, I'm with you. Keep going, and I may catch up."
I'll be thinking about GODEL ESCHER BACH for quite some time, but I can think of maybe 2 other people in my life that I would earnestly recommend it to.