In April 1980 Douglas R. Hofstadter won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R. Hofstadter (cover Penguin edition)
By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M.C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, the book expounds concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Gödel, Escher, Bach takes the form of an interweaving of various narratives. The book contains many instances of recursion and self-reference and is full of wordplay and puzzles. It's a very ambitious book that doesn't succeed on all levels, but Hofstadter's optimism and his drive to explore the huge amounts of knowledge available in the world make you want to read it again and again.
