[scrame]

Gödel, Escher, Bach is one of the most beautifully bizarre, transcendent creations I have ever come across. I wish every computer programmer that I ever heard say something silly like "I don't like art", or "I don't read that much" could be exposed to it. There is nothing so humbling as getting your ass kicked by 800 pages of a guy trying to explain an idea in the simplest terms he can.

The only things that I can compare it to are more literary, but "Breakfast of Champions", "Foucalts Pendulum" or "Infinite Jest", aren't out of order.

They are all products of brilliant, obsessive, minds making a concerted effort to explain what they can see above the clouds.

As much intellectual ego that gets bandied about between computer programmers, its nice to keep a humbling base where you can actually see that no matter how smart you think you are, that there are people who are way way way smarter than you and actually have the dedication, skill and expertise to try to help you understand what they have spent their life learning.