Achilles and the Tortoise walking through the pictorial works of Escher and Bach music for a fantastic introduction to logic and formal systems, especially recursion and self-reference, to arrive in style at Gödel's theorem, a of the most important scientific achievements of the twentieth century whose scope will probably be felt 100 years later now.
Is it a science book? a novel? both at the time and many more. Note that I have read this book twice, in French and English because some passages based on puns or letters seemed to me untranslatable: in fact Douglas Hoffstadter himself rewrote these passages in both languages ! A holy man.
