
Gödel, Escher, Bach - DanielBMarkham
http://www.hn-books.com/Books/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach.htm
======
biot
If your background includes experience dealing with logic, you enjoy wordplay
(puns, double entendre, etc.), and you're decent at math then you should have
no problem sailing through this book at a steady pace. Someone _without_ such
a background will likely have a harder time with it, but if that's not you do
yourself a favor and pick it up and just start reading. You just might be
surprised at how non-daunting it really is.

I had to share this as people might get put off by all the claims about how
it's so hard. It's really not. It requires patience, logical thinking, a good
grasp of language, a "plastic" mind, and no pre-conceptions of what it should
be saying. I suspect many here will find it to be a thoroughly enjoyable page-
turner that they'll be unable to put down.

~~~
Wilduck
> I suspect many here will find it to be a thoroughly enjoyable page-turner
> that they'll be unable to put down.

This was not my experience at all. The first few times I tried to read this
book, I blocked out a few significant chunks of time to get through it. That
never worked. As soon as I set it down (a couple hundred pages in) I wouldn't
pick it up again.

However, I recently succeeded in finishing it. It took me nine months of
reading a few pages in bed each night. The book was enjoyable to fall asleep
to. GEB was fun and thought provoking, it taught me something about
mathematics and made me think about the nature of consciousness, but it was by
no means a page turner.

I'd definitely recommend reading it though. And you were spot on with this
analysis:

> You just might be surprised at how non-daunting it really is [...] It
> requires patience, logical thinking, a good grasp of language.

I'd also add that it helps you _develop_ patience, logical thinking, and a
good grasp of language =).

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TylerE
Probably worth pointing out that there is a coordinated reading going on over
at reddit, starting tomorrow. <http://reddit.com/r/GEB>

~~~
dwolfson20
For other busy people, it's also worth pointing out that the schedule is very
slow and focused on understanding. For instance, we are taking the
introduction one section per day. The guy running it at Reddit created a nice
Google calendar for the "course." Needless to say I am psyched for this.

~~~
Ernestas
[https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/embed?src=OXM5YnM0cjgzaX...](https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/embed?src=OXM5YnM0cjgzaXFpbHUzNzY4bmdwcXU0NzhAZ3JvdXAuY2FsZW5kYXIuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ&gsessionid=JkxvltcDC26ejSX4FTXv6w)

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mikehuffman
Not to sound like a fanboy, but GEB is one of the few books (outliers being
another) that really made my critical thinking skills about the world,
society, and my place in it change. I literally feel like it expanded my mind,
or at least my capacity for critical thinking and awareness of such.

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holri
Probably the antithesis, also worth reading:

Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason:

[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/986428.Computer_Power_and...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/986428.Computer_Power_and_Human_Reason)

~~~
eru
The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose is the other anti-thesis.

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ctdonath
Awesome book. Read it in high school ~1985; so meme-dense I could only absorb
about 3 pages at a time ... all 832 pages, with great enthusiasm. Just what I
needed at a formative time. A geek must-read.

~~~
brudgers
My friend, Rich, brought a copy to AP Calc. I was at the Waldenbooks in the
mall, that afternoon picking up a copy...later traded it for _The Complete
Works of Shakespeare_ at university. Picked up another copy, which I still
have, about twenty years ago to fill the obvious hole in my library.

It's one of those books that people should be familiar enough with to be able
to talk about, even if they haven't read it.

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brudgers
> _"So how do you join up a philosopher, a pencil artist, and a composer and
> get something useful out of it"_

Into an eternal golden braid, of course.

[Utilitarian applications left as an exercise for the reader]

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bdg
I picked this up last week and have been slowly reading through it. It's a
great mental exercise in bending your perceptions as well as seeing new
abstractions or patterns you hadn't before. Something about that makes it
harder than your average writing to read through, despite the fact it isn't
loaded with a grandiose lexicon inspired from a linguistic perspicacity, per
se.

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robotresearcher
From the review: "It's almost like reading an Aesop's fable before the "real"
chapter begins"

The dialogue form of presenting arguments is traditional in philosophy.

<http://plato-dialogues.org/plato.htm>

~~~
JonnieCache
_> traditional in philosophy._

It's use in GEB is a tribute to Lewis Carroll's discussion of Zeno's Paradox,
_What the Tortoise Said to Achilles._ This is itself a homage to the platonic
dialogues.

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jgroome
I hate to gripe, but it's kind of disappointing that I can't get my hands on
an ereader/Kindle edition.

~~~
TylerE
Have to disagree. Given the nature of the book, preserving the format and
illustrations are VERY important. It wouldn't translate at all. In fact, the
author feels so strongly about that they he has insisted the original 1979
typset he prepared be used for all subsequent editions, to exactly preserve
the formatting.

~~~
theon144
Not having read the book, may I ask why is the formatting (not the
illustrations, that's kind of obvious) so important?

~~~
TylerE
Well, for one there are a fair number of equations, which ebook readers are
going to struggle with. Plus there are "structural puns" which depend on lines
aligning and breaking in a certain fashion.

Here's an example page from Amazon's preview:

[http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/8082/screenshot20120118at14...](http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/8082/screenshot20120118at147.png)

Note the musical extract, the heavy use of blockquotes, etc. It's pretty much
a worse case for an ereader.

PS: I'll admit I'm a bit late to this party, as I just bought my copy for the
Reddit readthrough, and it's the first actual dead-tree book I've bought since
my Kindle. I too was annoyed at first by the lack of a ereader version, but
after reading the first few pages of the intro I couldn't imagine reading it
any other way. This is a VERY dense book where I often find myself flipping
back a page or two to reference earlier material.

~~~
JonnieCache
Here's another good example of the funky typesetting: (the pencil marks
obviously arent in the original)

[http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ksx9yp5KRO1qznraho1_500.pn...](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ksx9yp5KRO1qznraho1_500.png)

It's also a great example of the mindbending trick-prose hosftadter gleefully
employs through the book.

EDIT: Here's another:
[http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ksjw79NLay1qznraho1_500.pn...](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ksjw79NLay1qznraho1_500.png)

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dbkbali
Nice review made me want to go back and read it again

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logicalmoron
I'mma let you finish. But I just gotta say that Gauss was the best
mathematician of all time. OF ALL TIME!

~~~
bdg
I know that site's down, but hacker news isn't reddit.

