I think it just doesn't work for everyone. While many people seem to love it, I failed to read it, twice. I think I got his point about self-reference and conciousness in the introduction, but from then on I found it so mind-numbingly boring I just couldn't continue reading past a couple of chapters. To me it seemed like he was going round and round re-explaining the same points over and over. In fact I thought reading GEB must be a hazing exercise for geeks. But then, since lots of people do seem to enjoy it, I guess it might just be one of those love-it-or-hate-it things.
Agreed. It seems disjoint and mostly hot air recycled over and over. Its not just you: there are a lot of us. My copy has done the rounds in the office and the conclusion is the same universally.
If the content was concise or written in the style of say Persig, Neal Stevenson or Ray Bradbury, I could stomach it.
Then again even worse is Ray Kurzweil who manages to do a GEB with far less content and that content is dubious and contrived rubbish.
A similar thing happened to me. I picked it up, read 200-300 pages and thought I could see where the book was going but found that it took such an agonizingly long time to reach its conclusion that I put it down.
Those simplistic-seeming explanations are subtly different, which turns out to be quite helpful when dealing with the conceptual difficulties of TNT. Of course, some more accessible language than TNT would make the book more approachable, but Hofstadter's objective is to demonstrate why you will not be able to circumvent the incompleteness theorem by adding syntactic sugar.
I only appreciated GEB after I took an advanced logic course featuring Cantor/Godel/Turing in university. Before that I didn't really get it. Well, I still don't, but now I can live with the ideas.
I'm amused by that joke even though I managed to read GEB twice in the 1980s. I've seen more people try & bounce off of it than make it through. It takes patience and tenacity.
