4 ms·

TBH I have attempted to read it many times but escapes my feeble mind. GEB is one of those books ...

• fit2rule 6y ago
  I always find that the best way to get something out of GEB, which I have consumed a thousand times, is to read it backwards. ;)
• maurits 6y ago
  You could have a look at 'The Mind's I' [1]. Its a collection of short essays edited by Hofstadter and Dennett. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I
• donquichotte 6y ago
  GEB always struck me as masturbatory, self-aggrandizing ramblings about simple ideas like self-similarity, with strewn-in, stream-of-consciousness anecdotes about Greek mythology, art and biology.
• mindcrime 6y ago
  What helped me get through it was consciously reminding myself "It's OK if I don't grok every single thing in this book this time through. I can always read it again. And again, etc." In other words, I didn't try to read it like a traditional textbook (which it really isn't) where everything is strictly factual, and laid out in a nice, linear, straightforward order. I found that I just had to accept that GEB is non-linear, byzantine, self-referential, and frankly confusing at times. Instead of being blocked when I felt confused, I just kept reading. Did I get everything out of it that Hofstadter intended to put in? Almost certainly not, but I still got quite a bit of out it, IMO. And I can always go back and re-read it.