A literary update

A combination of solid resources and a healthy dose of geeky curiousity often leads to great discoveries. My resource was this xkcd cartoon. My discovery? Check the message that appears when you hover the cartoon with your mouse.

Of course, this is not about xkcd's brilliant use of an image tag's title attribute, but about the contents of the message. One could easily enjoy the top layer of the joke (everyone knows the Bloody Mary legend, right?) and ignore the hidden message completely, but that's just not how a geeky mind works. The problem I encountered was that I didn't know who Douglas Hofstadter was (woe me!). The solution: Wikipedia.

If you just spend 2 hours clicking through the most distractive encyclopedia ever made and ordering one (or more) of Hofstadter's books on Amazon, you're probably not going to regret it because that's exactly what I did. As Wikipedia says, Hofstadter is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Anxious as I was to read that, there was nothing i could do but wait for my online order to be delivered. After a couple of days a nice pile of books arrived, containing not just Gödel, Escher, Bach but also William Gurstelle's Backyard Ballistics (tennis ball mortars are awesome).

For those of you that have already ordered GEB by now (or are planning to read it), don't worry. I won't spoil anything, i might just increase your impatience while waiting for it to arrive. The way Hofstadter manages to blend all forms of sience and art into one big literary fugue on human behavior and thinking is absolutely marvellous. The book is filled with chapters about abstract mathematical concepts, computer programming theory, molecular cell biology, structure and history of classical music, and the likes. Nevertheless, each chapter is preceded by a (mostly) easy-reading dialogue as an introduction to the chapter's concepts. Some of them are really funny, some of them really weird, but all of them are absolutely witty and well written. The final dialogue completely blew me away, providing a worthy grand finale to the book by having Bach's Ricercar a 6 from the Musical Offering as its structure and (amongst others) logical concepts based on the work of Alan Turing as its theme. In short: this is by far the best non-fiction work I have ever read.

After I finished that, I immediately passed it on to some friends who seem to like it a lot so far. As I was still waiting for my copy of GEB's successor I Am a Strange Loop, I quickly read through Marcus Chown's "Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You" and started reading Joseph Heller's "Catch-22". Both really worth reading.

As said, next on the reading list is "I Am a Strange Loop", which I will alternate with a review copy of PHP Team Development I'm about to receive from the friendly guys at Packt Publishing. Expect a review of that one as soon as I finish the book. If it's good, I'll most likely get some of their other development books (I know myself too well). Some titles there really tickle my geeky reading senses.