You're not wrong that GEB is grandiose and presumptuous in the material it takes on. But one important difference may be that LJA has started from one person's

You're not wrong that GEB is grandiose and presumptuous in the material it takes on. But one important difference may be that LJA has started from one person's very particular choices* and tried to tie them up and cast them as universal. That often doesn't come off well: I think it tends to be more about the author than the reader. (Caveat: I say this only having skimmed the paper here, not read the whole thing. And having loved GEB.) GEB, on the other hand, mostly started from a bunch of universal ideas, and used the author's idiosyncrasies as a way to explore those ideas. I think it comes much closer to hitting its mark. There's no accounting for taste, though. If you don't like Hofstadter's way of thinking, you probably just won't enjoy his book. I'm sure some people find the Dialogues and their wide-eyed "discoveries" of analogies with the essays' material to be smarmy at best. Personally, I find the language of this paper to be overly flowery and too cooler-than-thou (yes, I've heard of Erik Satie; does it matter?) to enjoy. ---- * I mean, "By introspecting my personal aesthetic sensitivities, I eventually realized that my tastes in the scientific, artistic, and physical domains are all motivated by the same driving forces"...that basically says "I think you're going to love reading my diary".