Hello Knacki,
Wow, that sounds really frustrating.
Funnily enough, even though I would be just the kind of person to stumble into the same "trap", with this book it didn't happen - I never wore myself down over those riddles. In fact, I brushed over trying to solve them so superficially, I didn't even remember the reader was asked trying to solve something for him/herself. Only after reading your post some memories of writing something on a piece of paper while reading that book came back.
I just never gnawed into them. Probably because I didn't start with it in school already but after I had started at university. (I'm 34, and the book fell into my hands something like 15, 16 years ago.)
During my first year a fellow student gave the book to me but frankly solving the exercises for the undergraduate seminars was more than enough for me and, already with my first go at the book, I decided to not give myself too hard a time. And just enjoy all those teeny-tiny "things" the author hid everywhere throughout the book. Which really already starts at the cover of the book. (At least both for the English and German version you see that wooden figure Douglas Hofstadter himself designed ( I think) and that, depending on the way you view it gives you the letters G, E or B. And he's playing with this letters (representing Gödel, Escher and Bach) all the time. The subtitle is "an Eternal Golden Braid" or, in German "Ein Endloses Geflochtenes Band", placing the initials into the order EGB.
And now look at the cover picture again, at the shadows on the left-hand-side and on the right-hand-side of the central figure. And when you try to get a very first overview of the book's structure, you see he divided it into two part, the first one called GEB, the second one EGB.
- GEB.JPG (32.79 KiB) Viewed 20117 times
And you know, there might not be any "deeper" meaning in it, except self-reference (at least I don't remember anything right now). But this is one of the key-themes in the book itself and he did not just write a book about self-reference.
He wrote a book about self-reference that is self-referencing itself over and over and over and over ... again.
And something else that totally stuch with me from the very first time I had that book in my hands. Back then I was going through a phase in which I always looked through the section "Bibliography". Guess what I found within "Gödel, Escher, Bach" - there the following book is mentioned:
Gebstadter,
Egbert
B. :
Copper, Silver, Gold: an Indestructible Metallic Alloy. Perth: Acidic Books, 1979.
A formidable hodge-podge, turgid and confused - yet remarkably similar to the present work. Professor Gebstadter's Shandean digressions include some excellent examples of indirect self-reference. Of particular interest is a reference in its well-annotated bibliography to an isomorphic, but imaginary, book.
And I was just totally floored by the author's joy in writing. Hiding something like this in the bibliography where probably hardly anyone ever looks, anyway. And it's not just the two-layered self-referencing in the imaginary author's name, but also in the name of the publishing house: "Acidic Books" versus "Basic Books" where the "real" book was published.
And this publishing-house joke was kind of rescued into the German version as well (the author was very strongly involved in its translation), though they didn't managed the company name, they to get "corresponding" locations: The book "Gödel, Escher, Bach - Ein Endloses Geflochtenes Band" was originally published by a company based in "Stuttgart". They made the corresponding publishing house be based in "Hengstgart". Playing with the fact that "Stuttgart" might remind you of a "Stute", the German word for a female horse. And "Hengst" is German for "stallion".
And again, all those word-plays are more than just plays because they do illustrate one problem when translating. What should be given the most weight when you translate: The words of the sentence, the meaning of a sentence, the structure of a sentence or the impression this structure gives you?
Or, the third thing that always comes to my mind before anything else when I remember this book: My amazement when I was reading a dialogue about Bach's crab-cannon and only pretty much at the end realized that that dialogue itself had been kind of like written in crab-cannon-like form. That musical piece was translated into a spoken dialogue without any reference to any particular musical note, but by referencing the structure.
And this is what makes me totally high each time I just have a look inside GEB: The pure, utter, joy of the author when writing it.
(At least I perceive it as a great joy. The authour probably went through a lot of agony as well...)
Tue Oct 17, 2017 8:55 am 
somewhere.
And thanks for the symmetry tip concerning Verve - I just tried that out and I am quite sure that I will spend many happy hours with this! 
