Mile
Zero

Man, I really want to be the kind of person who enjoyed reading Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach. It's been recommended by some really smart people, and Hofstadter himself seems like a very smart, agreeable person. The thing won a Pulitzer, for pity's sake. I should be eating it up. I feel bad about hating it. But I can't help it.

GEB claims, in an introduction that is both wry and impossibly self-congratulatory, to be a "fugue" tying together music, art, and math in an examination of how the mind works, and how AI could be designed. Hofstadter writes that he felt the need to add an introduction explaining the book's purpose because so many people had gotten it wrong. Someone with less investment in the topic should have maybe taken that as a hint. He also says that the book originally started as a pamphlet and simply grew and grew over the years--well, so does cancer. Thing is, these two problems are related: if people have trouble understanding that your 800+ page book isn't really about math and Bach, maybe you should consider editing out the two-thirds of it that are a crash-course in number theory.

Yeah, I'm a little bitter about it. Like I said, I feel bad--like I'm not living up to my potential by raving about the book. But fundamentally, this is a work for people who find themselves fascinated by the question "is math true?" And like many pragmatists, I think that question's basically a waste of time: better to ask "does math work? Yes? Okay then." Throwing a bunch of Zen into the mix does not help me take it seriously.

And the dialogs--sweet mother of mercy, the dialogs. For those who've never picked up a copy, Hofstadter precedes each explanatory chapter with a short, "witty" conversation, usually between Achilles and the Tortoise (it's an extended riff on a piece by Lewis Carroll). These are exactly as dreadful as they sound: careening wildly between pedantic and a math geek's idea of whimsical, their only saving grace is that they still look modest compared to Ray Kurzweil's ego-boosting appropriation of secretly-transhumanist historical figures (that said, what doesn't?).

But now I'm just being mean. I don't like GEB, but I think it needs to be put in context. Mentally, it gets shelved next to the Illuminatus trilogy or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance--books written by well-meaning hippies trying to locate Big Ideas for the general public through their own personal eccentricities. I even understand the urge--isn't that what many bloggers sometimes find themselves trying to be? I know I do. But on a blog, I think it's possible to forgive the occassional lapse into feigned profundity (sorry, readers!). It's a bit harder to swallow when it's a $20 tome that's as thick as the Arlington phone book.