OT: unreadable books (was: Language changes, spelling reform)

On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, jesse stephen bangs wrote:

> (this post rather off-topic)
>
> > > The 3 slowest and densest reads in my life:
> > >
> > > _Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_ by Douglas A. Hofstadter.
> > > J.S. Bach, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, artificial intelligence,
> > > EScher's artwork.  Stunningly good and worthwhile, but I was doing about
> > > half a chapter a day because I had to learn everything to understand what
> > > came after.
>
> I read this book, but found it to be a disappointment.  The author had
> some fascinating things to say in the first half, but he was completely
> incapable of paring out unnecessary junk, of which there were tons.  The
> dialogues between chapters tried to be cute but wound up being merely
> irritating, and there were several threads that contributed nothign to the
> authors purpose.  It was a good try, but it needed some editing.
Hmm.  I rather liked the dialogues, but got lost very easily.

> I have one worse.  I attempted to read "After Babel: Aspects of Language
> and Translation" but gave up about halfway through because the author
> would chase tangents ad nauseum and *never* seemed to get to his original
> point.  It was a like a long, dry, stream-of-consciousness on
> languages.  A great subject matter, but terrible book.  Plus, the author
> was fond of quoting long passages in Latin, German, and French without
> translating them, which I found arrogant and irritating.
>
> So, if anyone's thought about reading the above book, don't bother.
Another one that occurred to me that was pretty bad was Roger Penrose's
_The Emperor's New Mind_.  If you read each chapter as a high-flying
layman's introductory essay to the relevant topic (e.g. Turing
computation or quantum mechanics), it was fine, if somewhat hard going
(but thanks to that book I understand Cantor's diagonal slash, and
partial derivatives were familiar when we hit 'em in high school
calculus).  If you try to see how the heck the chapters actually relate
to each other, no luck.  Penrose tries hard for an overaching theme of
artificial intelligence but didn't IMHO succeed.

Also, I've had a couple math and physics profs tell me that while
Hawking's _A Brief History_ of time is well-regarded popularly, *they*
couldn't make heads or tails of it, and apparently their physics
colleagues couldn't either!

YHL