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I couldn't take Douglas Hofstadter seriously. I read I Am A Strange Loop instead of GED, which was supposed to expand on what he wrote in GED but he just comes across as a very confused, very woo-woo, very insecure man. It's a shame because he seems so highly-regarded in the Computer Science and maths world, but there's only so much crazy I can take.
He seems to have this idea that if you don't find the existence of recursion to be an almost religious experience then it's because you're first too stupid to understand it, and secondly you're afraid of it. It's mental. I know what recursion is, and I don't have this deep-seated dread of it. I just don't really think it's any more significant than a lack of recursion.
The reviews for GED don't seem to suggest anything like that in that book, though, so maybe he saved it all up for I Am A Strange Loop.
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bothwell
@Well_is_it
Do audio books count?
Just finished listening to The Stand which is a pretty good apocalyptic story about a super-flu. It kind of crosses over with The Shining which was a strange surprise.
The only thing I thought was a bit off was the way characters, particularly young ones, spoke. Its set in 1990 but was written in the 70's and they speak as if they're from then. I just kind of mentally auto-corrected the era back a couple of decades.
Next up is an actual book to read with my eyeballs. Either The Cosmic Serpant or Gödel, Escher, Bach: Eternal Golden Braid.