Book 1 I'm like 40 pages away from the end of volume 2 of War and Peace. Folks, we've hit a bit where I'm not at all digging on the main plots. My main interest is a subplot that you only get glimpses of through the eyes of two selfish young adults. I'll be glad when I'm at the end of this volume so I can put it back down and read something else. Book 2 What will be the something else? Three options: I cracked open The Phenomenology of Spirit last night. That will take a while. But then, one of the other books I want to read is Godel, Escher, Bach. Given up on it before, but I've made it far enough into Das Kapital that I feel more confident in plowing through Hofstadter's, um, style this time. The final book I've set before me is The Wealth of Nations. G.E.B. gets bonus points for the fact that I have a physical copy to read from, and it'd be nice to have a book to discuss with my Dad. He's suggested I try I Am A Strange Loop first, but I haven't found a copy of it yet at the used book store. Hegel and Smith get points for being suggested by francopoli and bfv a while back. Edit: Decided I'm reading Kant before Hegel... Work I don't wanna!
My interest is definitely waning. I started out enjoying it a lot. I've plowed through the past 300 pages on the theory that it'll return to the stuff I found interesting, but, well... it has been 300 pages...I gave War and Peace 200 pages and noped the fuck out so hard.
I seem to keep coming back to the style issue with my reading list. On the one hand, it'd be nice to zip through books easily. On the other hand, when all the choices you've laid out have a reputation for being word soup, there's less incentive to jump ship to easier waters. I did go and buy a copy of I Am A Strange Loop..I enjoyed GEB, although Hofstadter's style is...something, for sure.
I didn't find it wordy (but maybe that's me). There are a lot of puns and wordplay and odd stories. I guess the best way I can explain it is it's how mathematicians and scientists write when they're writing for fun. Something like this or Cliff Stoll's writing. Maybe that's the thing I liked most about it: it is a bunch of "weird math", but Hofstadter is having so much fun telling you about it that I couldn't help but enjoy it. (Then again, I'm a grad student studing "weird math" partly because I read GEB years ago, so YMMV.)