Le Ton beau de Marot

Watchmen (Alan Moore) Origins of Form (Christopher Williams) Starship & The Canoe (Kenneth Brower) The Size of Lumber (Nicholson Baker) Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Shunryu Suzuki) Deschooling Society (Ivan Illich) Moby Dick (Herman Melville) Bolo'Bolo (P.M.) Le Ton beau de Marot (Douglas Hofstadter) Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (James Lovelock) Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation (Umberto Eco) Neuromancer (William Gibson) The Intelligent Investor (Benjamin Graham) Don Quixote (Miguel Cervantes)

Gödel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. Both a work of literary and technical genius. Le ton beau de Marot, also by Douglas Hofstadter. Was blown by his description of how making the typographical choice of starting the first word of each chapter with letters decreasing in height to the normal page font size, caused him to rethink a whole chapter (he couldn't use descenders, which limits the first word, which limits his first sentence, which constrains his first paragraph and so on). Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Every single chapter is potentially mind blowing. The whole approach of trying to instruct rationality through such fiction is itself brilliant I think.

It's definitely fantastic, and one of the books that had the greatest influence on my thinking (I read it as a teenager, 20+ years ago). If you want something less theoretical, more personal, poetic and emotional, his "Le ton beau de Marot" (English, despite the title) is also fabulous. He takes a short poem and translates it a hundred different ways, all the while musing about what "translation" means (literal, conveying the same emotion, using the same metaphors, between cultures...) as well as about thought, language and meaning more generally. And then, while he writes the book, his wife gets a brain tumor and dies, and the book becomes part of his mourning.

That's a great book. I've just started reading I Am A Strange Loop by Hofstadter and it's promising. Also by Hofstadter: Le Ton beau de Marot was a good read. GEB is the big one, but if you like his style - probably worth checking out some of the others. Best to get print books for this particular author though.