I wonder if you would like McGilchrist's book then. It's full of associations and drawing lines between seemingly unrelated things, and with sentences containing more than seven comma's not being uncommon.
Writing style is important for me too. I can complete a narrative, story-style book in 2 days. I can't complete a non-fiction book in that time that's half the size. My favourite books are ones that set out to teach something practical in the form of a story (like The Goal).
I have finished non-fiction books. They tend to be fast paced and immediate with what I want out of them. To the point.
In general, that fits with the ADHD type i.e cut the bullshit and get the point!
What are some of the flaws? Or what would I be able to read in order to notice them?
Basically, McGrilchrist makes claims about what we know about how the brain works with a certainty that we simply don't have, let alone draw conclusions from it as if they're facts. He's also prone to "start from a viewpoint and find evidence that matches it"-line of thought (Popper would not be happy...). But if you are aware of that and appreciate more how the whole overarching narrative fits together it's a very enlightening book with very inspiring lines of thought.
Anyway, in my experience it goes very well with:
- "Metaphors We Live By" and other works by Lakoff & Johnson, the book that introduced the concept of "conceptual metaphor" to the world. They are referred to a lot and having read them helps you spot when McGilchrist might be misinterpreting their work.
- "The Stuff of Thought" by Steven Pinker, who asides from writing a really fun book on language, also gives some good arguments tempering Lakoff & Johnson's overenthusiasm a bit without being dismissive of them (although in their defense, metaphors are criminally underrated in their importance to thinking).
- most books by Oliver Sacks, who is more qualified to make statements about the brain than anyone else on this list, but "Seeing Voices" especially, because it really dives into the connection between language and brain development.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary#Re...
Thank you for sharing your experience, I may have to give `I am a Strange Loop` a try after all, and do the skip-300-pages trick with GEB.
I've tried to get through it multiple times, but I never managed to get far into the later chapters without literally falling asleep. I do not blame on the book; it's likely a consequence of my ADD. However, a significant portion of my friends did manage to get through it, and the summaries and explanations they have given of it were very inspiring. Another reason for me to conclude that it's not the book, but me ;)
Perhaps interestingly, I typically have no trouble with reading long, dense books. One of my favourite books ever is "The Master & His Emissary", an incredibly flawed but also very inspiring tome mixing loose interpretations of brain science, art history and philosophy (the best way to deal with its flaws is to approach any "scientific" argument as a philosophical line of reasoning inspired by a layman's (mis)interpretation of the underlying science, but that it's the reasoning itself that matters). I wonder if the difference in writing styles between TM&HE and GEB could tell us something about what kind of stimuli an ADHD person does and does not respond to?