Some notes on Hofstadter's Surfaces and Essences

"But the real problem is that the book is entirely horizontal, without also being linear. It does not build. It doesn't grow. It just keeps spreading outward. This means you can put the book down any time and pick it up a month later without losing anything. You can open to any page and start reading without having missed anything."

The above is a quote from a review on amazon.com, by David Wineburg. I don't think I've ever quoted an amazon review before, but I found this quote so captured how I feel about lots of recent books that it was worth keeping.  I want to read books that grow not that just spread out ad nauseum to use Wineburg's words. Yet, very often the writer does not have anything more to add than this one idea with its many examples.

I didn't read Surfaces and Essences but I was intending to until I read the review. It sounds like the book's premise is that we use analogies to make sense of our experiences. We don't categorize but we analogize. However, according to the review, there is no point to this observation. The question the over 500 pages apparently leaves us with is: so what?  Not usually one to let a review substitute for reading the book, I am finding myself doing this more and more exactly because of the problem that Wineburg points out. Too much surface and not enough depth.