On a large num­ber of ‘best of’ or ‘books that changed my life’ lists I always spot Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB), the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Dou­glas Hofstadter.

When my copy arrived at my door recently I was taken aback by this tome and realised that it was going to be a dense read that will need—and hope­fully reward—all of my atten­tion. As with sim­i­lar books, I will under­take back­ground research and read­ing first so that I can fully appre­ci­ate all the con­cepts con­tained within.

This is when I found MIT’s ‘spe­cial pro­gramme’ specif­i­cally based on the book. While it doesn’t pro­vide a wealth of use­ful, sup­ple­men­tary mate­r­ial (much like the Wikipedia entry), it does men­tion some good Bach pieces to accom­pany your reading.