Gödel, Escher, Bach

I'm a Yegge fan-boy, and his most recent post mentioned Gödel, Escher, Bach - the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter. Which got me to thinking...

A couple of programmers/bloggers I respect have the book on their must-have lists: Joel, Stevey. And most programming bloggers refer to it reverently.

I tried to read the book shortly after graduating college. I didn't finish it, because it was incredibly boring and repetitive and boring ... and repetitive. Turns out many don't finish the book, no surprise to me.

I'll repeat myself (in the spirit of GEB I should probably recurse), GEB was a complete snoozer. It reminded me much of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - another snoozer. There's only so much repetition I can stand.

I'm sure I missed all the puzzles and word-play - I certainly didn't get to the end where Hofstadter's characters discuss books that end before the final page (a joke that took 700 pages to set up).

Perhaps the book provides a path to enlightenment to people who are not familiar with recursion, self-reference, and the incompleteness theorem. Or, maybe there is enough wordplay and "charming" dialog to get you to wade through all 800 pages (there is that one nearly at the end).

I'd have been happier if the book were condensed to 150 pages.