My experience was similar to yours. I read it when I was 15 or so, a bit at a time. I didn't understand all of it, but I knew that this was something formative and that maybe a computer science degree would be a really good thing to pursue. I've read it several times since.

Unfortunately, I've found Hofstadter's other stuff to be less compelling, other than his Scientific American column, which was collected in Metamagical Themas (an anagram of Mathematical Games, the column his replaced).