erratio

Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter

I acquired this book seven or eight years ago, when the awesome lecturer in my first-year compsci course kept telling us what a great book it was and how we should all read it. I then spent the next six  or seven years getting a couple of chapters in before getting distracted (sometimes by the exercises he gives the reader, more often by the constant references to fugues, which give me the urge to go listen to some), then coming back to the book later and deciding that I couldn't remember the first chapters well enough and needed to start over. I finally got through a large chunk of it during the summer. I've now stalled again but this time I don't expect to go back to it anytime soon.

The book is about the nature of mind and computation, with side-excursions into language, music, and lots of other areas. Each chapter is preceded by a Dialogue between Hofstadter's characters of Achilles and the Tortoise (and later some others), with the topic of the Dialogue foreshadowing the material covered in the chapter.  Hofstadter writes like a philosopher, albeit a more interesting one than most. For those who've had the good fortune to never have read a philosophy paper, I mean that his writing style is long-winded and meandering. I get the impression that he's way too impressed with his own writing cleverness for his own good, and would have benefited from an editor making him cut the length in half. Even some of the Dialogues suffer from this.

As for the content... I would have loved this book if I'd read it when I first got it, seven or eight years ago. He does a good job of illustrating Goedel incompleteness, recursion, and most of the other topics in the mind and computation cluster. But I've yet to read anything in GEB which is new to me, because my interest in those topics means that I spent the last several years learning them in more digestable chunks. Overall, my recommendation for this book would be to skim the Dialogues, and then only read the accompanying chapter if the Dialogue shows you some really interesting ideas that you've never encountered before.

The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

These are the first two books of what Rothfuss promises will only be a trilogy. The fantasy series starts in the present day, where Kote the innkeeper lives in a quiet village, while a war goes on somewhere far away and there are rumours of monsters and strange creatures being seen nearby. A chronicler comes in, forces Kote to admit his identity as the legendary Kvothe, and gets him to tell his story, so that it can be recorded for posterity. The bulk of each book then follows Kvothe's retelling of his past, with occasional interludes to the present day. Kvothe, we learn, is both extremely clever and very dextrous. He learns music, acting, and general social skills from his extended family, the Edema Ruh (read: Gypsy equivalents, but without the criminal aspects), magic from the University he eventually ends up in, swordwork from a warrior race, and lovemaking from one of the Fae. Lest you think that Kvothe is completely without flaw, he's also arrogant, proud, impatient, and sometimes far too clever for his own good. He also spends a ridiculous amount of time mooning over his ladylove, a mysterious woman who seems to be calling herself a different name every time he sees her and alternately welcomes him and pushes him away.

Patrick Rothfuss is an amazing writer, tying together the present-day narrative, the retelling in the past, and lots of stories, songs, and legends recounted by various characters at various points. Unlike Lord of the Rings, where the poems and songs were distractions from the narrative, nothing that Rothfuss writes is completely irrelevant; but he also manages to avoid Checkhov's Gun syndrome since he doesn't go out of his way to point at any of the foreshadowing but instead lets it do double-duty as world-building background and possible foreshadowing. The story is character-driven, with a large cast of memorable characters, some of whom are awesome and some of whom I wanted to punch in the face for being so vivdly annoying. There's also more plot than you can shake a stick at, but it sneaks up on you rather than being given centre stage - you feel like you're reading about the day to day life of Kvothe the student, and suddenly you realise that if you connect all these background points, there's lots of stuff going on or potentially going on in all the different time periods that he describes.

I would recommend the books to everyone who likes fiction. I got through each book in a couple of days, despite their being large enough to clobber a mugger with.