Har de har har. You didn't finish it, did you?

Nope.com.

Quitter.

Straight up.

Say something nasty about it then so it isn't your fault.

I don't feel comfortable doing that about a logic book that won a Pulitzer. GEB is also one of my father's favorite books. I think. We had a copy leering at me out of the bookshelf for most of my childhood. When he chose to flirt somewhat uncomfortably with my special placement teacher in 8th grade, it was the subject of their flirtation. So there's that.

That means it's your fault.

Absolutely.

How far did you get, quitter?

Seventy-something whole pages.

That's barely through the introduction.

...which took me four days.

I seem to remember you bragging about polishing Stephen King's "It" in four days.

Yup.

Isn't that like a thousand pages?

Something like that.

So what you're saying is that you can cut down a thousand pages of pablum no problem but a few thousand words of genuine scientific thought sticks in your craw.

You could say that. Although I did Piketty in a week. Lorenz in four days. Judt in two weeks.

Soft sciences, cheater. Soft sciences.

I got an engineering degree and don't practice engineering. Surely that says more than my choice of reading material could.

So what was it, exactly, that made you tuck tail and run, quitter?

hooo fuck lemme count the ways.

THINGS THAT I HATE

1) Puns. Hofstadter can't write this book without using seven different witty meanings for words.

2) Precious language. Every third sentence starts with Now (comma) or Thus (comma) or But (comma). Thus, it bored the shit out of me. But, it also pissed me off. And, I had a real hard time seeing the message through the language.

3) Affectations. Get to the fucking point already. I give a shit about your turtle and achilles. Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael" was Lorenz's "On Aggression" starring a talking ape because, I guess, talking apes are cuter than Austrian nazi apologists. I hated Ishmael, too.

4) Puzzles. Of all kinds. In all things. Given a choice between solving a Rubik's Cube or playing with two legos, I'll play with those legos until the end of time. GEB is a collection of puzzles ("try it!") used to illustrate a point.

5) Pointlessness. This is a book about recursion and self-reference illustrated through recursion and self-reference to illustrate the recursion and self-reference of recursion and self-reference. For 700 pages. Except -

Okay, look. I used to dig the shit out of Escher. I even used to dig the shit out of Bach. I owned a couple woodcuts, in fact, and 3 versions of Toccata and Fugue D Moll. Until someone pointed out to me that Escher was technically a genius but he had nothing to say.

Which is an oversimplification, but there aren't a lot of Escher prints that are, well, about anything. They're clever and beautiful but trite. They're the mathematician's Thomas Kinkade.

And I'm reading for my own edification here - this is not increasing my penis size, augmenting my earnings potential or decreasing my tax burden. I'm doing this for fun and for my own edification. I'd like to learn something.

It took me 70 pages to learn that I wanted to learn nothing more from Douglas Hofstadter and I'm cool with that.

You're still going to be arrogant about it, though.

I'm gonna try not to. I recognize that there are probably wondrous truisms buried in those remaining 630 pages but I'd rather go to the dentist than find them, and that's a failing of mine, not of the author, not of the book.

But a person who hates puzzles, puns, trite language and pointless identities, I reckon, is never going to enjoy Godel Escher Bach.

__________________________________________________________________

NEXT UP:

Hellifino. I was kind of saving up for this one because I've been meaning to read it for decades. This has kind of spurred a crisis of faith because it's a bridge too far. Between Bl00's Reviews #1 and this I've read 38 books but have only reviewed six.

I prolly owe mk another one, since this was his recommend. I've been meaning to read some Eco.

Yes, his life is parted in the middle. I am strictly a fan of the young, fearless, and spiritual Wittgenstein. TPL is inspired thinking.

> I take PI to be divine words

!!!

b_b, you have some explaining to do! :)

I agree with that. However, many animals express an intelligence we can at least relate to.

Right: We grew up in the same environment. We breathe the same air, we drink the same water, we bask in the same sun, we experience the same weather, our predators and prey are drawn from the same grab bag. That was my point: we have a long legacy of parallel development with animals. Machine intelligence? We're going to have absolutely nothing in common with it.

It's telling that we can't even agree upon the fundamentals of our own intelligence. We just know it when we see it.

And I'm not sure we will. When the inception parameters are so wildly different, what we see is not very likely to strike us as "intelligence."

My dad has been trying to get me to read Godel Escher Bach for about 30 years now. Maybe one of these days.

Didn't know it and actually would have missed the 'nod'. Thanks

(Speaking of our dear friend, LW, have you read C Hewitt's screed against God(el))Really juicy stuff.

@mk - you have a bug here - keeps mangling the link. @b_b: google for "contra godel et al"

Damn, dude.

Yeah, yeah. So I just finished some truly horrible books. Like, a lot of them. Poisonwood Bible is not a truly horrible book. Sorry, Jeshk0.

Must've been, like, a million. It's been like four months since the last one.

Dude. So. many. books. Like eleven of them.

All horrible. You're an asshole.

No, no! Some of 'em were fuckin' dope! but they weren't recommended by y'all. so they're exempt.

That's bullshit.

Those are the ground rules.

I think you're just saying that so you don't have to say something nice about anything.

Okay, look - Poisonwood Bible is a vaguely interesting premise that didn't become that interesting a story. Because I've been marinating in CIA shit for the past 5 years, all the Lumumba stuff was kind of interesting -

You were going to say something nice.

Okay. The prose is substantially better than Da Vinci Code, the facts are much better researched than Daniel Suarez' Daemon, and it went quickly. I started Poisonwood because the audiobook I was cranking through finished while I was adjusting the valve lash on the Benelli, and I finished it before I had the airbox back on. Of course, that says more about adjusting the valve lash on a Benelli triple than it does about Barbara Kingsolver.

You suck at nice.

You know what's a good book? Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett. Strong female protagonist in WWII against a Nazi spy. There are some bits that don't make sense but you give it a bye because it's just a tight little tale. That's a great book. I also read The Martian by Andy Weir in there because I kept putting off Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Both of those are great books, even though one is a made-up Robinson Crusoe story and the other one is a statistical analysis masquerading as a book. Poisonwood Bible IS NOT A BAD BOOK. But I grew up in a privileged white enclave in poor Hispanic and Native American Northern New Mexico so White Guilt As Literature is something I was sheep-dipped into twice a year every year from 1st grade through graduation.

Look, I get it. As a white male I am History's Greatest Oppressor going back to Roman times. I don't understand nobility, I don't understand struggle, and I'm the stock asshole in every tale involving women or minorities. That's the cross I bear for having the best job prospects, the least racism, the position of highest privilege and the assurance that unless something has gone horribly wrong, things are going to work out for me by design. I'm definitely benefitting most from this exchange.

But as "white people suck" stories go, Poisonwood Bible isn't even particularly well-organized. I oughtta know, authors have been enumerating my suckitude since Weekly Reader was 4 pages long. In general, I was instructed by bored, overeducated liberal women married to particle physicists from the East Coast who came to Los Alamos to design nuclear weapons and feel bad about it. As such, every curriculum involved at least two books about how the White Man was so horrible to the native residents of Northern New Mexico because apparently feeling guilty for white oppression at the age of ten was the panacea your average Vassar grad needs.

A screenwriter would end Poisonwood Bible about half-way in. The rest of the book is just sort of flailing. A screenwriter would also have to do something about the structure, because it's organized into "books" wherein the mom gives up a useless excuse for why her daughters were forced to suffer hardships in the previous book, then the daughters suffer hardships for the next book. It's tiresome. Guilt does not equal wisdom and suffering does not equal experience.

None of the characters are real, either. You get no sense that their motivations come from a human place. They are required to go through certain motions in order to illustrate the point that Kingsolver wants to make and internal power is detrimental to these actions.

Yeah, there's some lyrical writing. I'd call it purple prose. If you like palindromes, Ada's great. (if palindromes bug the shit out of you, Ada grates.) For those of you longing to have your writing interspersed with Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams, this is the book for you. For those of of you who can't stand either, strap in.

Maybe you should, just, you know, stop.

Maybe I should. Except East of Eden was a great book. American Gods was a lost opportunity, but it could have been a great book. Thinking Fast and Slow was worth reading even if it made me mad. Contrary to what I've written above, I didn't hate Poisonwood Bible. It's just... eh.

eh. Oprah's Book Club, yo.

And don't I know it. Look - yes, the CIA was fucking horrible to the Congo. But the CIA is horrible to EVERYONE that isn't a privileged white male, and even they often get the shaft. There are better Africa books. There are better CIA books. There are better sister books. There are better preacher books. Are there better "sisters in africa with a preacher and the CIA" books? Dunno. Maybe there aren't.

Hey, I read it. I don't regret reading it. I appreciate the suggestion. But it wasn't my thing.

NEXT UP

Well, I've got an epub of Godel Escher Bach staring up at me from my Dropbox. But I'm also kind of burned out on things I have to read. Right now I'm cranking through Sagan's Contact and re-reading Stephen King's On Writing.

It might be GEB. It might be Name of the Rose. It might be Confederacy of Dunces. It also might be a while. We'll see.

Nice list. "Godel Escher Bach" was one of those great books, that I am still very hesitant to suggest to people - it's not for everyone, and it gets very dense about halfway through. So beautiful, though.

Pro-tip for readers of "A Clockwork Orange" - there is a glossary at the back! I read it to the end before I realised that. I'm not sure if knowing that in advance would have made it better or worse, though!

Godel, Escher, Bach is his magnum opus. Metamagical Themas might be a good way to ease in though. -It's a series of essays he wrote in the Scientific American.

How do you not?

A book is a book. Some books are great. Some books suck bilgewater. All that is in the opinion of the people reading it. A Confederacy of Dunces was published 11 years after John Kennedy Toole had committed suicide because he couldn't find a publisher. Stig Larssen didn't publish a thing while he was alive because he wrote books for fun; we know about The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo because his widow thought we should.

We are raised and culturally conditioned to adore the fuck out of Moby Dick, and saying Moby Dick is a boring book is the equivalent of heresy. But you know what? it's a boring book. That's what makes "literature" - shit that people were forced to read, so they insist other people read it. It's like an English department hazing.

Half those books we're forced to read because they were crazy popular once. We're required to read Last of the Mohicans not because Natty Bumppo is some paradigm for American life, not because Cooper was a brilliant writer, but because the Leatherstocking tales were the equivalent of the Twilight books in 1826.

They're just books.

Lord of the Rings is just a bunch of books. I've never read them. I fought tooth-and-claw through The Hobbit in 4th grade and that piece-of-shit book took me three goddamn months. I read Stephen King's It in 5 days three months later. No way in hell was I going to slog through Lord of the Rings. I enjoyed the movies very much... but then, I don't have to read twelve pages of Elvish folksongs to enjoy the movies.

Claiming that Tolkien invented "the modern fantasy paradigm" is like saying George Lucas invented "the modern science fiction paradigm." Yeah, he's had a lot of imitators. However, most of the good books are the ones that don't.

No, no. You've established this. You're supposed to hate on the book.

Actually, no. It only looks that way. Believe it or not, I don't hate everything y'all recommend. So regardless of everything else, thundara and 8bit (damn you, son) have picked some books that I, too, really enjoyed. And let's be honest. We're two for five. And let's be further honest - humanodon kinda hated on Kahneman too.

Well what makes this book so very 60th percentile?

You know Discover Magazine?

No.

Liar. It's like Scientific American for people who have a life.

And an associate's degree.

Shut up. There's good stuff in there, albeit it's often kinda remedial.

Like Popular Science minus the perpetual motion machines.

Not nearly that bad. So look - Discover has a monthly column called "Vital Signs" that's basically a "Mystery Diagnosis" or "Medical Detectives" or whatever except they've been running them since like the '70s. They're anonymous medical professionals (supposedly) describing their whackiest cases. Anyway - Dr. M has done an exceptional job of taking the contentious, technical history of cancer and its treatment and cracking it down into a flowing, conversational "vital signs"-like exploration of all things cancer.

Sounds... dry.

I know! But it totally isn't. Dr. M finds the mystery, the pathos, the frustration, the joy, the politics, the humanity, the tragedy of it all and lays it bare.

For 600 pages.

Okay well he's got a conceit that annoyed me until I decided I couldn't come up with a better method. He basically tells the same period of history over and over again three or four different ways, outlining different aspects. So you kind of get a few different "slices" through medical history: the genetics slice. The chemotherapy slice. The radiation therapy slice. The prevention and epidemiology slice. The politics slice.

I'd get lost.

I did get lost, me. There are a lot of names that come back up and they're all Dr. Somebodyorother. But that's probably 'cuz I listen to my books and I listen to 'em at 2x. Or 3x if they're really boring. This book on Google? It's a 3x book. But I digress. Despite the fact that it's, like, a history of cancer, I found it engaging and interesting and even though I got lost a few times, it was definitely worth the read.

Said the weirdo who actually finished Piketty.

Right. If you have no interest in public health or science, there's no possible way this book will interest you. If you're trying to decide between Emperor and 50 Shades, go with the Twilight slash-fic. But if you enjoy non-fiction in general, this is a great general non-fiction book.

...well shit. Usually I have to remind you to say something nice.

Usually I have to remind me, schizophrenic me. But this is just an overall pleasant, interesting, intriguing book. I hadn't fully realized that cancer is the #1 killer in the United States right now because everything else that used to kill us more often has been cured. I also didn't know that chemotherapy owes its existence to mustard gas. There are some kinda cool James Burke Connections-type... connections... in this book and a lot of appropriately saccharine hand-wringing over, like, real alive-right-now people so that despite all the dry shit, it still hits home. Here's a great quote from the book, ascribed to a journalist: "Statistics are people with the tears wiped away."

This book is still damp, but dry enough that you can make out the fine detail.

NEXT UP:

Shit, I don't know. I now have Godel Escher Bach on my Kindle. Honestly I probably owe rationalist flagamuffin some Pynchon. We'll see.

I suspect after this wretched fucking Google book I'll want to suck down something fast and easy. I did an Audible deal though and I'm staring down the barrel of Love in the time of Cholera, The Picture of Dorian Gray and It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis.

I did download Lucifer's Hammer. but that was mostly for my wife. I've read it four times.

Maybe I'll go for 5.

Sweet, let's get started:

- The Consolations of Philosophy. Again an easier read, great way to get situated and have a lasting knowledge of the basics from Plato to the present day.

- The Rebel by Albert Camus. Much meatier than Consolations, but a profound standard of philosophy and a significant necessity to every philosopher's collection.

- Plato: Jumping to the other extreme of the difficulty spectrum, for our purposes I'll consider this non-fiction because it's intended to be. Read the Dialogues, Sophists, and get associated with the Republic. At my current internship, the founder of the bank (whom I did not recognize) started talking to me about my interest in books. I mentioned philosophy and made the grave mistake of citing The Republic... I last read it in 8th grade. As luck would have it he knew everything Plato ever put on paper by heart and wiped the floor with my stuttering uncertainties and backpedaling. Dear god, if you read Plato make it count and read it well.

-Slowly but thoroughly go through essays by Nietzsche, Camus & Sartre, and other philosophers that interest you instead of trying to tackle a 1,000-page manifesto that you know you won't have the patience for.

As a sidenote that isn't directly philosophy, the last leap to confidently calling myself an atheist (at least, confidently not associating with any faith or religion) was The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, if you're into that. And if you are, The Selfish Gene is a much smaller, great read as well.

roll the drums please, the endgame: I should probably include this on it's own, but there is a book called GEB- Godel, Escher, Bach- that is the only book I have ever tackled that I had to drop because I just wasn't ready for it yet. However, I've been told by a select handful of the most intelligent and successful people I've met that that is one of the most significant intellectual texts in recent times. I honestly can't say much more because I just don't know enough to say-- but according to the bigshots, this is the motherload. By the way, I'm curious kleinbl00 if you have read or heard of this book.. I feel like it would tickle your fancy; tickle it with an electric cattle prod, that is.