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Why Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life. (2022)
(philosophygeek.medium.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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I am a non-reader, so take maybe my opinion doesn't carry much weight, but I really enjoyed reading GEB as a teenager.
I think it might've been the last book that I read just for the sake of reading, and not with the intention of learning about a specific topic.
I have to say, this is exactly the kind of book a teenager will deem profound.
It's essentially the same chapter rephrased about 20 times and manages to stretch a rather simple idea (conceptually, not the proof behind it) way too long. 100 pages would have been enough.
Maybe I'm biased, because I read it after graduating in computer science, but to me it seemed rather meh. Yeah, recursion exists, yeah fractals are weird, yeah systems can't accurately describe themselves.
That's basically all I remember from the book, I figured that I had just forgotten most of it. I was unfortunately one of those 13-year-olds who thought they were much smarter and deeper than they were, so the book being full of itself definitely tracks.