I have to disagree with you here, and strongly. I don't think Gödel, Escher, Bach is a good book. Hofstaeder is clearly very smart, curious, and open-minded, and I love all those things, but the book itself is just so pretentious and sort of pointless. It's precisely the wrong kind of book you want to give a bright teenager, because it will only encourage them to get a head-start inserting their head up their own arsehole, metaphorically speaking.
> I don't think Gödel, Escher, Bach is a good book. Hofstaeder is clearly very smart, curious, and open-minded, and I love all those things, but the book itself is just so pretentious and sort of pointless.
I'm curious: Do you feel this way because it isn't a math textbook?
Not at all. My own recommendation, God created the Integers, isn't a math textbook. I doubt Hofstadter himself would claim GEB had a point - it was more of an intellectual fugue put to paper. If GEB was a novel it would be more along the lines of Finnegan's Wake than Les Misérables, and I would never ever give the former to a teenager.
