NGL, GEB was a slog. There is a free MIT course that covers it, and I'm glad I made use of that.

"I Am a Strange Loop" by the same guy covers the same concepts, albeit without the whimsey or color.

One of the few “you gotta read it” books from intellectual leaning friends that I never bothered reading. It could have states as much in 1/4 the number of pages.

I think he misrepresents Russell and also Godel in ways. I enjoyed the book when I was young and it did launch my interest in logic but reading Godel’s personal writings, he had great respect for Russell and literally wrote in a paper defending Russell that he would not have made his discovery without the Principia Mathematica, because it showed him an instance of a consistent language and then he took the further step of noticing you could do this infinitely. My recollection was Hasshelhoff thought Russell was a kind of dunce who didn’t know what he was doing. He was putting in the fucking work for others to build on, and it was incredibly hard work if you read Russell’s autobiography of that time.

I prefer his autobiography (https://xkcd.com/917/).

Seriously though, this question is unanswerable, but your answer is probably one of the few books I'd get behind as an answer to this.

i have the book and tried to read it many times, but never grokked it tbh. ;-)

I read it in high school and I probably would've picked it at the time. Fun note though: ~3 years later when I was learning Lisp it hit me that my understanding of GEB had been very shallow.

I second that.

Its translations are also the best translations known to mankind (I read the German one, the French is said to be as good or better).

Been reading it for about a year on and off, I did read I am a strange loop before and really enjoyed the ideas and also the emotional side of it.

Hofstadter is such a brilliant writer. All of his books are really on another level.