Back in the day, lots of people did read GEB, although we often missed the point. Apparently (as he wrote in an introduction in a later edition) the point of th

Back in the day, lots of people did read GEB, although we often missed the point. Apparently (as he wrote in an introduction in a later edition) the point of the book was to encourage people to study AI (at a time when it wasn't popular). While I can see this now, at the time I was more intrigued by his chapter on molecular biology and went into that instead.