was received. In the preface to its 20th anniversary edition, he laments that the book was perceived as a hodgepodge of neat things with no central theme. He writes: "GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?"

Hofstadter seeks to remedy this problem in I Am a Strange Loop by focusing on and expounding the central message of Gödel, Escher, Bach. He demonstrates how the properties