So, I finally finished "Godel, Escher, Bach" this week. It was quite the journey, working to finish a book that never quite managed to capture my imagination and get me excited enough to power through it. Part of that was probably due to the large amount of information that it was spewing out and asking me to process at once, especially since I took so long reading it that some of the related topics in the book that built on each other were no longer fresh in my mind when I got to parts of the book that referred to them.
The book did have some very interested discussion of symbols, words for example, and their meaning, and the idea of Tangle Hierarchies, wherein the distinct levels of a system are no longer so distinct. For example, DNA provides the symbols (code) by which all proteins in a cell (and the larger organism) are put together. However, DNA is one of these proteins. Kind of a chicken and egg situation. There were lots of other parts I enjoyed, like the Diagonal method for proving that you can't make a complete list of irrational numbers.
Anyway, given that I'd finally finished GEB, I headed off to the library in search of something a little less weighty. I had a couple in mind, but one hasn't been published yet, and the other was not available, so I took to browsing. I ended up coming across the Elmore Leonard section, and as I've heard his name a bit lately, decided to grab "Get Shorty" as I knew it had been made into a movie. A movie I haven't seen, but at least it tells me that a certain number of people enjoyed it. Guess we'll see how it goes.
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