Rating: 
Summary: Provokes wide ranging thought
Review: This is possibly the best book written in the twentieth century. It links mathematics, philosophy, art, music and genetics in very clever and natural ways. It is laced with excellent humor. It presents no less than a way of viewing the universe. Everyone who thinks themself educated should read this book.
Rating:
Summary: A beautifully paradoxical book.
Review: Godel Escher Bach is, by far, the absolute best book I have ever read. It is far-reaching and its topics seem scattered, yet, at the same time, it is quite focused, in an odd sort of way. It swallows itself in its rather idiosyncratic way, and you can't help but want to go with it. Each time I read this book(which, by the way, is sitting next to me right now), I find more and more and more. I don't think even Dr. Hofstadter comprehends the entirety of if its complexity and beauty. If you are sophisticated enough to understand it, you can't help but love it.
Rating:
Summary: GEB as scripture
Review: In 1979 a book appeared which expressed a religious vision using examples from mathematics, art, music, psychology, biology, physics and other fields so amazingly that I placed it with my collection of world scriptures. It remains there today.
Written by artificial intelligence researcher Douglas R Hofstadter, the book, Godel, Escher, Bach won a Pulitzer Prize. It was called the "best non-fiction book of the 20th Century." No theologian of any age -- not Aquinas, not Tillich, not Nagarjuna, not Samkara -- has written more ingeniously about God and the mystery of consciousness.
Its 800 pages are difficult but fun. Even if you don't do math or Zen koans, you can follow the book's development because before each chapter is a story which illustrates the chapter's theme. These fictions are themselves written as pieces of contrapuntal music. "Crab Canon," for example, reads the same whether you begin at the first or the last sentence.
One theme of the book is recursion, which can be described as a procedure which contains a smaller version of itself, like a story within a story. This theme prepares the reader to see how DNA, for example, is information which copies itself through generations -- DNA as both "software" and "hardware."
In this light, the book itself becomes a recursive revelation, a self-extracting document which the universe has brought forth. This suggests that the universe, too, is recursive.
This book illustrates how can we decode its sacred meaning from every and any situation.
If there ever were a book about which it might be said, not in any simple, literal sense, but in the most profound way possible, that it was written by God (if there is a God), this may be the book. How can such a claim be justified? The book pushes Hofstadter aside (or rather, inside) and itself answers in the most natural yet amazing way.
Rating:
Summary: Gratifying
Review: I have to say that this is the second time I have read this book.
I have found it to be one of the most gratifying volumes it has been my pleasure to read.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant.
Review: This is the most intriguing book I have ever read. Extraodinary and perplexing... very clearly exposed. The author is brilliant. Obligatory reading, to be taken with care. Often times more disturbing than fascinating. Never boring.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent preparation for understanding complexity today
Review: I discovered this book quite by accident on the shelves of the university library. I have since read it four times, each time discovering a deeper pattern and greater meaning. There is a deeper genius in this text which even Mr. Hofstadter can not claim. For anyone who is prepared to receive it's message and has a mind open to modes of thinking far removed from the average reader or thinker, this book is an essential primer for an induction into the world of pattern recognition and the induction of pattern recognition into the world. This book will truly open your eyes. Would anyone mind selling me a hardcover copy?
Rating:
Summary: I'm sorry but this goes in spanish
Review: Soy (pretendo ser a los 47 años) matemático, amo la musica y la pintura. Jamás hubiera imaginado el tremendo impacto que me ha dejado la lectura de este libro (tengo una copia en español), en mi formación profesional. Este libro vive a mi lado, ampliamente lo recomiendo a quién se deleita con la música, la lógica en general, el arte, y la computación, que es de lo que vivo. No puedes ganar nada más de lo que ganas con su lectura; El mejor premio.
Rating: 
Summary: It's OK
Review: This book is fun to read but it takes some of the analogies way too far...
Rating:
Summary: "These fragments we have shored against our ruin"
Review:
I would never give anything 10 out of 10. My copy of this book is sitting on the desk to the left to me. It usualy lives on the bookshelves about 40cms to the left of that. It is battered, worn and the paper cover's torn. It is the 1980 Penguin edition. It's been read about 10 times. It's been skimmed a hundred times more. Max Escher visited my life when I became fascinated with the process of lithography after initially discovering the work of William Heath-Robinson. J S Bach wrote some wonderful blues baselines which I shamelessly plagerised when doing my music O-level. Godel was a strange name (despite my background in mathematics). I write computer programs for a living. Alan Turing has always been my hero (he died 3 months before I was born). Pictures and music have always been part of my life. Formal systems more so. Zen came in the 60s (via, indirectly, Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"). There are those who find this book trivial and the jokes facile. There are those who find this book difficult and confusing. The former are those who lack the joy of a child finding magic in numbers and who have their own intellectual agenda to impose. The latter need encouragement: this book needs work, it makes you think and thinking has consequences. You do not need to accept Hofstadter's thesis (though it is a damn sight more convincing than that of Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Clothes), but you *must* find joy in its presentation. The only comparable book (though far more limited in its domain) is Raymond Smullyan's "What is the Name of this Book?". The very exsitence of GEB adds colour to our lives and gives us, in Ian Drury's immortal words, "reasons to be cheerful". This book is the starting point for thought, converstation and discovery. It presents concepts as a process of revalation. It is the work of a unique mind. Some people don't like that. I do. Try it and see.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderfull!!!
Review: The enormous richness and complexity of this book combined with a warm and human sense of humour will remain in the mind of the reader for a long time. Definitely an all time classic.
| 
