#8 in Popular science
Gödel, Escher, Bach
- 777
- Pages
- about 14 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“Gödel, Escher, Bach” is a playful, exacting book about how minds and meaning can arise from parts that have neither. Hofstadter gets there through formal logic, Escher’s pictures and Bach’s music, mixing stories and puzzles with dense argument across nearly eight hundred pages. Readers who take it on may work through it with pencil and paper, rereading as they go; not all finish, and some find stretches slow.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979) by Douglas Hofstadter, is a book about the intellectual themes common to the lives and the works of the logician Kurt Gödel, the artist M. C. Escher, and the composer Johann Sebastian Bach, and shows the thematic connections among mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Through short stories, illustrations, and analyses, the book explains how systems acquire meaningful context from the "meaningless" elements that compose a system; self-reference and formal rules; isomorphism; the meaning of communication; how knowledge can be represented and stored; the methods and limitations of symbolic representation; and the notion of "meaning".
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.8 across 309 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 68% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Popular science average of 8.3. That is how 8.6 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.4 | 73 | 24% |
| Hardcover | 8.9 | 236 | 76% |
Frequently asked
How long is Gödel, Escher, Bach?
It has 777 pages — longer than 98% of the ranked books in Popular science.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Popular science — with scores between 8.3 and 8.9, closest to this book.
