Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern" is not the Hofstadter book people probably expected to eventually turn up in a Passages column, to be honest. And I do not want to disparage his most famous work; I read Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (GEB) one Christmas vacation, I believe when I was in the eighth grade, and it was a revelatory and enchanting experience, with a profound impact on the course of my future life. But everyone knows about that book, and has an opinion on it; I think it's a literary masterpiece and even when it gets something wrong, it does so in an interesting way.