Alright, so a month ago i made this same thread, and it seemed quite popular.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8257369)
Since then i´ve:
Read:
Siddhartha - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddhartha_(novel)
Das Steppenwolf - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppenwolf_(novel)
Into the Wild - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Wild_(book)
Bought, but yet not read:
Godel, Escher, Bach - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
Being and Nothingness - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness
CODE - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code:_The_Hidden_Language_of_Computer_Hardware_and_Software
Let´s hear what HN recommends and is currenty reading
This book is dense. But takes three times as long to read as any fiction that length. Most paragraphs require stopping and pondering.
It is my second time attempting to read this book. The first time, was about 6 months ago. Now, being on my second year in CPGE and having been through quite some math, it was more approachable.
Hofstadter invents his own system of formal mathematical logic and his own procedural programming language to explain concepts, without going into what would be considered a more "standard" formal logic system or even the Turing machine itself. He does a good job piecing them together but at certain times I feel like it'd be more meaningful to read the original works on several of the subjects he touches on.
While formal logic certainly predates this book, a lot of the AI and neuroscience research that he describes were (and are) very much active. The book was published in 1979, and its references to AI reflect the time period.
The book is hard to read, especially for prolonged periods of time. It's dense and the concepts are not the easiest to begin with.
Worth reading? Maybe.
Will it expand your thinking? Probably, though maybe not as much as you might expect; due to the broad spectrum of topics covered, it's not as deep as I would like in some areas and spends too much time smoothing over difficult topics in certain fields in order to make "clever" maps between concepts in the fields (though in this aspect he's just being a computer scientist---simple representations that map cleanly across everything! Sadly, the world is not that way).
Very good? Absolutely.