Nick, I had a copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid for many years and always intended to read it, but not being a mathematician I tried a couple of times and it was very daunting.

I was interested in the concepts because I have always loved Escher's art and always loved J.S. Bach. I don't like admitting to failure, but this one was too much for me. Even the size of the book was daunting, and it was only the paperback version. Paperback doorstop? Definitely!

It had been recommended to me by a lovely older lady who was a library client and we used to talk about a lot of wide ranging subjects. I'm guessing she read it from cover to cover. I just flicked through bits of it, here and there.

In the end, after about 20 years of owning it, I gave it to someone who appeared to have the skill set to read it. In exchange he gave me a lovely, large pictorial book on Escher's art. Fair exchange, I thought.

Recently I have finished reading a couple of mind expanding books by Dean Radin, called The Conscious Universe, and Entangled Minds. A large chunk of each book refers to quantum theory which I know absolutely zilch about, but it is in reference to the scientific study of psi capabilities. Very thought provoking. He is also very scathing of people with closed minds who try to deny the results of some very rigourously evaluated science, and that includes scientists and sceptics. A balanced read.

(Cautionary note: if you want to start a conversation about this, I'm only open to rational, analytical discussion about it. I'm not prepared to play exhausting mental ping-pong with people who have beliefs masquerading as logic, which is why I didn't mention these books before. There was a thread on Mudcat over a decade ago in which a number of us were having open, rational and courteous discussions about such topics and then after the thread had become quite large, the dyed-in-the-wool sceptic who had been contributing to the thread told us that this is an open forum therefore he could use all of our comments in his "analysis" of the topic at the university (?) where he was working. I thought that was below the belt. The thread ended after that, which I thought was sad.)