Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language

BasicBooks, 1997. ISBN 0-465-08643-8 (hardcover edition). 632 + xxiv pp.

IMHO, Hofstadter's best book. It's quite different from Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, although in characteristic Hofstadter style it covers as wide a multiplicity of topics. To top it all, it quotes a few Tom Lehrer songs.

Le Ton Beau de Marot is, on the surface, about translation, especially of poetry. It centres around various translations of the poem `À un damoyselle malade' by the not-very-well-known French poet Clément Marot. It also talks about Pushkin, AI, and the death of Hofstadter's wife Carol.

If you're at all interested in poetry, translation, Hofstadter, or just plain cool stuff, it's a must read. If you found yourself wishing GEB had more code, it's probably not.