"Feynman is another example of a writer who exposes his interest in a wide variety of stuff(Brazilian drumming for eg) but he isn't yawn inducing." Do keep in

"Feynman is another example of a writer who exposes his interest in a wide variety of stuff(Brazilian drumming for eg) but he isn't yawn inducing." Do keep in mind that Feynman's biographical books (Surely You're Joking, etc.) were not written by Feynman in the classical sense. They were drawn from taped conversations and written/edited by Ralph Leighton. Many people often speak and write with different tones and levels of formality, and this can cause a message to come across in a different way. Perhaps Hofstadter would have done better to have a number of conversations with, say, Thomas Pynchon, and then TRP could have written a very twisted version of the same book. I think the nerdiverse would implode upon itself as the multiplicative power of people claiming to have read books they haven't would create a third book, vaguely resembling a comic book version of Ulysses.