Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter

I was hoping that Hofstadter’s book would be my first five star review for 2012. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to wait a bit longer. I was very disappointed. The author says several times that he first envisioned this work as a pamphlet. I wish he’d stuck to that. The book is too long, poorly edited and the at first cute intervening dialogues between fictional characters become unbelievably annoying. The worst part of this book for me is the author’s continual arrogance. He comes off as ever so clever, more so than his poor readers. How this book won a Pulitzer Prize (1980, general nonfiction) is almost beyond me. Perhaps the reviewers couldn’t understand the book but thought they should and passed it’s 700+ pages off as award quality.

Maybe I would have enjoyed this book a little more if I’d read it as a sophomore in college, when I was introduced to artificial intelligence in my computer science major. I enjoyed Hofstadter’s book with its quick reminder of several courses I took, including abstract algebra, computer theory, AI, programming and logic. I say reminder rather than refresher since I doubt I could have learned these concepts via his writings. He talks deep but uses cutesy language that serves, for me, to obscure what he’s getting at rather than enlighten. This book paired with some other textbooks and a good professor would have been nice. To be of use today, though, the book needs to be updated. It shows its age, having been writing in the late 1970s. The 20th Anniversary addition only includes an updated preface, no extra epilogues, chapters, or thoughts on the field that so entranced a young Hofstadter at the dawn of his career.