I must admit I've started the book numerous times before only to toss it aside in frustration. My innate weakness in mathematics makes it very hard to plow through.
Anybody read it?
Yes, but can't claim to have followed all of it.
Yes, it was great. It richly deserved the Pulitzer it won.
Don't let the math (and there's really not a huge amount of it) get you down. You can "blurb" over it without having to personally follow or verify every step the author makes (although its' fun to do so if you can).
Much of the fun stuff in the book is philosophical (or other sorts of non-mathematical) anyway, and I can't think of any point that Hofstadter makes which is *only* supported mathematically. The math isn't the point of the book anyway, just enjoy the ride.
One warning: Sometimes a new chapter may appear to suddenly depart from what came before and start a totally new topic. Don't feel lost, it really *is* a new topic and you're not supposed to immediately see a connection to the prior chapter(s). What's fun, though, is that eventually the "new" material *is* suddenly tied back into the ongoing thread (or should I say "braid"?) of the book, and you discover that what appeared to be another topic entirely is yet another view of the same material.
The book is very intricately constructed, and at times I felt that if any paragraph had been lost, the whole thing would unravel like a tapestry with a broken thread. It's a truly remarkable work. Even if you can't follow any particular page, it's well worth going on so that you don't miss the several thousand other little joys to be found. The book covers an amazing amount of philosophical gems, musical and artistic insights, and a grand tour of some of the more interesting highlights of information theory, formal logic, epistemology, and a dozen other fields that most people never even dip a toe into.
Of course. It is a classic, and for good reason. It isn't really written for Joe Layman, unlike many of the pop-sci books. GEB is more like a clever and lucid introduction to computational theory for people who are at least somewhat mathematically inclined but not requiring a rigorous mathematical education to understand. When it was written, a few of the ideas in the book were pretty cutting edge, but that is less true now. Nonetheless, it is a worthwhile read if one is inclined.