For what it's worth, "The Mind's I" is on the list, which was edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett.

I Am a Strange Loop is also good...

I haven't read The Mind's I, but I rather enjoyed GEB when I read it in college. I didn't realize it was considered a book "no one actually reads." My sense has been quite the opposite!

Back in the day, lots of people did read GEB, although we often missed the point. Apparently (as he wrote in an introduction in a later edition) the point of the book was to encourage people to study AI (at a time when it wasn't popular). While I can see this now, at the time I was more intrigued by his chapter on molecular biology and went into that instead.

Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" is not on the list.

> November-December 1999

A New Kind of Science was published in 2002. Unless the author of this list had access to the future, it would have been hard to include it.