jbgreer

I’ve now read the whole series twice – once as the books were originally printed and last year. I avoided the recent movie.

I enjoyed the series the first time. I attribute this to two things:
1) I was much younger, and
2) my reading of them occurred over several (many?) years.
I think the latter point is most significant. For those of you planning to read the entire series, I highly recommend NOT picking up the next book as soon as you’ve set the previous down. Why? Because Adam’s writing style is not conducive to that type of reading. If you’ve read any of the things written about the man, you know that was a procrastinator of the highest rank. This shows up in his writing, which, while clever, is often repetitous. You’ll read one work, start another, and then say to yourself, “Gee, that sounds just like…” That’s because it is. Indeed, some paragraphs (and chapters) of his later works seems like edits of earlier paragraphs (and chapters) of earlier books.

This isn’t to say that you should read the series, if you want: I think it’s highly entertaining and he has given us some great scenes and lines that may last a few decades or even centuries. Just be careful in the way that you read it.

When I finally finished GEB in the late 80’s, I told a professor friend. He looked at me and started laughing and said, “Oh no. You haven’t really finished it… you only think you have.” It’s true: GEB is likely to be one of those books that you return to over and over again as you attempt to integrate what you’ve picked up from it into ideas and disciplines.

As I like to say, this is my 2nd time to try graduate school. In the early 90’s I was in a PhD program in experimental pysch; I have enough hours for a MS, but didn’t finish the program and left to pursue a degree. Now I’m a thesis away from a MS in Computer Science.