Goodreads | Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Library Binding) by Robert M. Pirsig

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Robert M. Pirsig	4	53	06/23/2008 03:30PM

Charlotte rated it:

(review of isbn 0553277472)

08/10/08

recommends it for: someone who likes to torture himself.

OK, maybe I'm being a little too harsh. I actually enjoyed the idea of the cross-country motorcycle ride, the details about motorcycle mechanics, and especially the portrayal of the narrator's relationship with his son. The son was the best part of the whole book. Unfortunately, there wasn't much space for sonny, because dad was too busy advertising the author's brilliant philisophical insights. Even more unfortunately, the insights weren't brilliant, and consumed hundreds of tedious pages....more

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Rick rated it:

(review of isbn 0060589469)

08/20/07

recommends it for: Those tolerant of shallow philosophy (e.g. Matrix fans)

There are three threads weaving through this book (none of which, as is pointed out, has much to do with either eastern philosophy or with motorcycle maintenance.)

The first is a straightforward narration by a man riding across the country with his young son and two friends (a married couple). This evocative travelogue is by far the most enjoyable aspect of the novel.

The second element is a sort of mystery as that man struggles with his memory; it's gradually revealed that he's on the roa...more

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Trevor rated it:

(review of isbn 0553277472)

06/27/07

bookshelves: abandoned

Read in June, 2007

recommends it for: masochistic philosophers

I started reading this book because i'd heard from a number of people, including comedian Tim Allen, that it was good. In fact i read an entire Tim Allen book ("I'm Not Really Here") which was kind of about his experience reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence. Tim Allen, although not exactly a respectable philosopher (maybe not even just respectable), had some of Robert Pirsig's philosophy without all his inane bullshit. At least Tim Allen's book was funny.

Admittedly, ...more I started reading this book because i'd heard from a number of people, including comedian Tim Allen, that it was good. In fact i read an entire Tim Allen book ("I'm Not Really Here") which was kind of about his experience reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence. Tim Allen, although not exactly a respectable philosopher (maybe not even just respectable), had some of Robert Pirsig's philosophy without all his inane bullshit. At least Tim Allen's book was funny.

Admittedly, i enjoyed the book in the beginning. I could tell that the plot was going nowhere specific, but i like books like that. In fact i wrote one. But as i pressed on, page after page, chapter after chapter, i became first bored with it, then irritated. There are essentially three parts to this book, all of which are intertwined at irregular intervals:

1. The philosophy stuff. I really like this aspect of the book; all the time he spends talking about Phaedrus and Phaedrus's experiences was mostly fascinating to me. Phaedrus is the real star of the story and the only character i really liked.

2. The motorcycle maintainence stuff. Despite the fact that i had no idea what most of it meant, it's factual and to the point, and somehow intersted me just by the way it was written. At some point i even thought about buying a motorcycle, just from inspiration by this book.

3. The main story. It's a story about the narrator (Pirsig himself) and his son, Chris, on a motorcycle journey across the country with some friends. Chris is 11 or 12 and mostly just annoying, but the interactions between Pirsig and his son just make me think that Pirsig is a bad father. He always seems angry at Chris for no particular reason and Chris seems to cry a lot due to it. I wonder what Chris thought when he read this book. And it's no wonder to me that the guy's wife left him shortly after it was published (Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_P...).

The main thing that i think the book suffers from is the way he abruptly switches between the topics. I've no problem with a rapidly shifting story, if the transitions work. Here, Pirsig would get me going enthusiastically through a Phaedrus segment, and right at the climax...dump me back into him and Chris doing something boring. Then we'd trudge along through that for a while, and suddenly he'd see something that reminded him of Phaedrus, and we'd come to another Phaedrus segment which was not a continuation of the previous.

I gave up on the book shortly after the halfway point where Phaedrus began repeating everything over and over and going absolutely nowhere. Sure, i'd like to see what ultimately got him committed to an asylum, but i don't feel like reading any more of this repetitive and bland crap to get there. Ok, you can't put a definition on "quality," i get it, move on to something else. I feel like what Pirsig is saying to me is, "I've got a point...but i'll never tell you what it is!" and i hate being taunted. Especially while reading. If this were a movie, chances are i'd tough it out and wait for it to finish just because i know it'll be done soon. But reading, although often more enjoyable, is more time consuming and nobody can deny that. And after wasting weeks of my life reading Robert Jordan's "The Shadow Rising," i've learned my lesson. Life is too short to waste on crappy books. There's lots of good stuff out there, i'mma go get it....less

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Jessica added it (review of isbn 0060589469)

06/24/08

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Katherine rated it:

(review of isbn 0060839872)

05/23/07

Read in January, 2007

After years of people saying, "Oh, you're a philosophy major? Have you heard of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? You should read it!" I finally broke down and bought a copy. I am usually wary of books that seem to hold promises of sweetness and light and spiritual awakening, in this age of The Purpose-Driven Life and Silver Ravenwolf.

My thou...more

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Christy rated it:

(review of isbn 0553277472)

02/23/08

Read in January, 1997

Maybe it's unfair to give a poor rating to a book I read in high school. However, I like to think that I was wise beyond my years and knew a phony, self-congratulatory, pretentious buffoon when I saw one. On the other hand, I did wear baggy overalls with Birkenstocks every day back then and wondered why I didn’t have a boyfriend, so clearly I didn’t know everything.

But as I read through the reviews here, I am confronted with a rush of unpleasant memories about this particular reading exp...more Maybe it's unfair to give a poor rating to a book I read in high school. However, I like to think that I was wise beyond my years and knew a phony, self-congratulatory, pretentious buffoon when I saw one. On the other hand, I did wear baggy overalls with Birkenstocks every day back then and wondered why I didn’t have a boyfriend, so clearly I didn’t know everything.

But as I read through the reviews here, I am confronted with a rush of unpleasant memories about this particular reading experience. The narrator did indeed seem like a dick. And he may have been okay with that, because I got the impression that he’s one of those guys who doesn’t care if he comes off as a dick, because his purpose in life is to Figure It All Out, and disseminate his impressive knowledge to the masses of sheep-like mouth-breathers who wandered into Waldenbooks and picked up a mass-market paperback copy of his masterpiece. Their lives will be changed! The narrator is too busy unraveling the mysteries of the universe to bother with being likeable. It’s a sacrifice, but someone has to do it. We should be thanking him!

And this is just an aside, but part of me always wonders if there is something wrong with me, or if I’m an elitist or delusional because I’ve never read a “life-changing” book. That’s right: a book has never changed me. I read as a kind of re-affirmation of what I think I already know, somewhere deep down. Or I simply read to experience the pleasure of a good story. I’ve put a book down and thought to myself, “Boy, that was a good book. I’m in such a pleasant/ponderous/gloomy mood now. Well done!” But never have I put down a book and thought, “Before I read this, I was wandering around on this thing we call Earth with the wrong ideas about life/people/religion/mechanical engineering, but now I have been enlightened. From this point forward, my life will be different. I will be a better person.” I don’t know. Maybe I just have a bad attitude, or think that I’m smarter than everyone else. Maybe I’m no better than our friend Mr. Pirsig. If you think that may be the case, I suppose you can just ignore this review completely and read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

But! If you think I’m just like Pirsig, you would want to heed my advice about this book and avoid it, wouldn’t you? Aha! You see, you can’t like us both, otherwise the universe will implode. Or will it? Perhaps it is no more than a conundrum I have devised out of sheer malice and a masturbatory sense of self-importance. Perhaps I am full of shit. You’ll never know for sure.

You can’t escape this philosophy-ninja’s intellectual trap. Don’t even try....less

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Mason rated it:

(review of isbn 0060589469)

03/21/08

Read in December, 2007

recommends it for: Everyone

I must start by saying that this is one of my favorite books ever. Although it is deep and complicated and takes a lot of focus to read, I feel that there are a lot of great messages here in the author’s search for Quality. This was my second time reading this book, and I liked it more this time.
Interlaced with stories from an across-the-west motorcycle trip with his son and some friends, Pirsig tells the story of his past in an almost former life before being admitted to a mental instituti...more

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Tatiana rated it:

(review of isbn 0553277472)

08/13/07

bookshelves: contemporaryfiction

This book is extremely good and also important. It's a treatise on metaphysics as well as a compelling story which the author says is autobiographical. It's exactly right about the scientific method, and the way we go about discovering truth as a society and as individuals. The analogy of working on motorcycles is a good one. In my life it's been programming computers and figuring out how to get industrial machinery to work, but the same process works for all of the above.

The thing I f...more This book is extremely good and also important. It's a treatise on metaphysics as well as a compelling story which the author says is autobiographical. It's exactly right about the scientific method, and the way we go about discovering truth as a society and as individuals. The analogy of working on motorcycles is a good one. In my life it's been programming computers and figuring out how to get industrial machinery to work, but the same process works for all of the above.

The thing I find most excellent in this book is that it points out the step where the mystery comes in, i.e. coming up with new hypotheses, the long sought "aha" that comes when you're working on a hard problem. Science has no method for how you get that. You just play with the problem, turn it over in your mind, try things, strive to understand, and then <poof> the answer sometimes appears in your head. It's a complete mystery. There are stories in the history of science, about Kekule who figured out the ring structure of Benzene from a dream about a snake swallowing its tail, about Einstein at age 13 picturing what it would be like to ride the crest of a light wave, and on and on. This book showed me that buried in the heart of science is something generative and alive that defies scientific explanation, simply because it's outside the system.

"The truth knocks on your door, and you say 'Go away! I'm looking for the truth!' so it goes away." That's such an exact description of how our preconceived ideas often keep us from finding the truth. (The truth in this context is completely knowable once we've found it. I mean if the motorcycle runs afterwards, then we've solved the problem. That's why I love applied science and engineering.)

The other great idea that I use all the time from this book is that the very cutting edge, the place where the tire tread hits the pavement, is always messy and confusing and just a place of floundering around in uncertainty. He makes the analogy of a train, with all the cars full of facts that we know, and the engine, where new track is being laid, is not contained in any of the cars. It's always murky up there, and never neat and well-defined. So that unpleasant feeling of uncertainty, of confusion, of floundering around, it's the VERY THING that we should cultivate in order to discover the truth. I tell myself that when I'm in that situation, that I should revel in this feeling instead of dreading it. (And, in fact, I mostly get paid because I can stick through that feeling to the payoff, the "aha" part. The most important thing I learned in college is that something utterly confusing and befuddling can come clear if I will invest the effort to play around with it and figure it out. So I get to do that all the time now. =))

What I have found in the years of figuring out why programs or machines don't work, and fixing them, is that really very little in life and the universe is well-understood. We have this large mental construct of scientific understanding, and it's indeed impressive. We can cure typhoid now and build bridges that stay up (conscious irony). But even in the areas that we would like to think are very well known, and neat and clear, there is so much that isn't understood. Otherwise, why would these questions come up continually? Why doesn't this program work? Why is my pulper feed system not working the way we expected? Why did my motorcycle engine run so badly in the mountains? What made this bridge suddenly collapse during rush hour?

This book explores all of those ideas and sheds a lot of light on them. I understand the universe far better because of having read this book. That's why I gave it 5 stars, a rating I reserve for books that changed who I am or how I see the world....less

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Kevin rated it:

(review of isbn 0553277472)

07/05/07

bookshelves: metaphysics, spirituality

Read in August, 2006

Well, this book is not for everyone, and I have certainly heard people say that they found it overblown, pretentious, pointless, etc. but I loved it and found that what I read and my life experiences as I read it formed a didactic and interesting dialectic with the content of the book.

The book itself interstices Pirsig's account of a motorcycle road trip with his son and some friends with the story of his personal and professional struggles developing his philosophy of "the metaphysics ...more Well, this book is not for everyone, and I have certainly heard people say that they found it overblown, pretentious, pointless, etc. but I loved it and found that what I read and my life experiences as I read it formed a didactic and interesting dialectic with the content of the book.

The book itself interstices Pirsig's account of a motorcycle road trip with his son and some friends with the story of his personal and professional struggles developing his philosophy of "the metaphysics of quality". There is also some history of philosophy, although this is to provide an exposition for Pirsig's arguments, so he cherry-picks the stories and interpretations that he tells. This is fine because it is not meant to be a primer on classical or any other kind of philosophy; I don't really have an extensive philosophy background but the little I did know helped I think.

Not that they have anything to do with the book, but I have a couple of stories about it. I figure that most people who have any interest in this type of book are already pretty familiar with it, so I won't say too much about it other than that I couldn't put it down and I wholeheartedly recommend it. While I don't agree with Pirsig's entire viewpoint, most of it rang true and even that which didn't was still an excellent impetus for introspection.

I got a copy at a used bookstore (I'm pretty sure it was this one) on a trip up to San Francisco with my girlfriend and a mutual friend. At first I had been browsing, and had found a cool coffee table book on phrenology which the lady at the counter chatted with me for a little bit. Encouraged by the chatting, I asked her if they had a book I had been looking for, The Secret Teaching of All Ages by Manly P. Hall, which is an encyclopedic reference about the occult, masonry, astrology, etc. (although it is reprinted in paperback, the original book had lots of charts, illustrations, etc that would not fit in the smaller paperback format and had to be abridged, so I was looking for the original, which I am told is something of a collector's item in certain circles).

At this point, the warmth drains from her face. There is an ominous, beginning-of-a-movie-like silence, and she informs me, "No. I don't sell that book. I'm a Christian." When I ask for further clarification, she says that the book contains "a secret spell to undo the universe" and that she didn't want any part in helping anyone undo the universe, so she would not sell the book even if she had it.

Well, things got kind of awkward at this point, and while trying to avoid eye contact with her, I saw a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in a stack of books waiting to be shelved, and tried to help myself. My friend Ian H had told me it was really good and I figured I'd check it out. She swatted my hand away and sent someone to get me a copy off the shelf. She told me that it was by far the most popular title that they sold.

I didn't get around to reading the book until almost a year later, when me and Vinny were on our rail trip to and through Hokkaido. The book got really water damaged during our ill-fated hike up and down Rishi-fuji-zan right around when I was reading Pirsig's mountain climbing allegory. A lot of the stuff about how when "you can't move forward, you move sideways" and etc. resonated with my at times aimless wanderings over the past couple of years.

So, in summation, you'll really like this book, unless you instead think it's interminable, rambling, and obtuse like this review....less

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Erich rated it:

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12/03/07

bookshelves: classics

Read in November, 2005

recommends it for: Philosophers

Readers of Thoreau, Emerson, and Dillard will be entranced with this book. In the best traditions of transcendentalism, Zen is about the journey, and the answers that we find when asking the difficult questions, about fairness, and quality.

You, as the reader, are taken along on a journey. Pirsig writes with his hands and head, and analyzes a concept in much the same way he would diagnose a problem with his motorcycle. You begin with knowledge, and you form it into a tool with which t...more

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Wheels rated it:

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10/27/08

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in October, 2008

Hard to know where to begin. This is the type of book I know I'll reread every few years, alongside Dune and Fear and Loathing (strange company). I've kept it in my bag just to go back over highlighted sections and make sure it remains useful.

Pirsig essentially tries to break down the ways people make value judgments and how they reason. At the center of this is how we view and react to aspects of technology. He splits it up into classic (function) and romantic (form) all while narrating...more

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Carolyn rated it:

(review of isbn 0060589469)

07/14/08

Read in July, 2008

recommended to Carolyn by: Jim Parker
recommends it for: Meghan Anderson

I decided to finish the book I've been reading all summer: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. I've had a lot of complaints about this book, as I read it. It was a rather grueling endeavor, certainly not most people's idea of summer reading. Having just finished the book, however, I can say that it was well worth the experience. This book turns on its head our idea of what it means to be sane. The book can be described as generally a thesis on substance, form, and...more

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Rebecca rated it:

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11/29/08

Read in November, 2008

recommends it for: angry vets and burn-outs

Okay, I confess I haven't finished it yet. But I'm finding it so irksome I don't know if I'll be able to get all the way through it. Here's what I wrote on my bookmark 50 pages in:
"the author's logic is self-contained, entirely self-referential and so his argument is self-sustaining! He can set up armies of logical strawmen and have them elaborately duke it out in massive rhetorical battles taking place entirely without any grounding in reality.
He has the manic ADDH intelligence of the...more Okay, I confess I haven't finished it yet. But I'm finding it so irksome I don't know if I'll be able to get all the way through it. Here's what I wrote on my bookmark 50 pages in:
"the author's logic is self-contained, entirely self-referential and so his argument is self-sustaining! He can set up armies of logical strawmen and have them elaborately duke it out in massive rhetorical battles taking place entirely without any grounding in reality.
He has the manic ADDH intelligence of the kind that experiences UFO abductions, never finishes his degree, judges everyone as hopelessly inferior from behind the counter of the sporting goods store. Self-satisfied and superior with a fake Indian name he took on from the time he made deep eye-contact with a timber wolf. The kind of guy who never made it all the way back from 'Nam."

So that was 100 pages ago and I've had to change my evaluation a little. He went to Korea, not Vietnam.

He's driving me NUTS! It's one false premise and false conclusion after another-- astonishing leaps of logic (e.g. the more I do experiments, the more ideas for future experiments I have, therefore science only leads to more questions, therefore scientific pursuit is meaningless since the purpose of science is to know everything, and if I always have more questions, I'll never know everything. AAARGH!)

He's an irritating narrator: his female companions ooh and aah at his speechifying. "Gee, Bob, how do you think of this stuff!" while bringing him steaks. His male companions are awed and impressed with his technical knowledge and mystical skills. He wasn't kicked out of school for "laziness and immaturity" as the official reason went-- it was because his ideas were so RADICAL the whole university system would have come toppling down!

The only expert he cites is Phaedrus....who turns out to be himself! Before a nervous breakdown! He talks about discovering the beautiful power of Phaedrus' logic and writing. And it's himself, all along. Very annoying.

Ugh. I just want to say to him, yes, you're very smart. Yes, technology and art are a false dichotomy. But no, saying that does not turn the world inside out and make your the smartest person in the universe....less

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Adam rated it:

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02/15/08

Read in April, 1998

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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anna rated it:

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05/07/07

recommends it for: everyone

i read Zen for the first time after my senior year of high school. then again after my sophomore year of college. and most recently, over winter break after coming back from studying abroad.

in high school i was a moron. i didn't know enough for the book to mean a whole lot to me, but i did enjoy some parts of it. generally, a philosophy background of even a high school level is useful for understanding some of Pirsig's lengthy discussions on dudes like Hume and Hegel.

the second time i...more

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Frederick rated it:

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06/21/07

bookshelves: haunting, memoirs, pirsig

Read in May, 1977

recommends it for: People who've driven cross-country.

I read this when I was in eleventh grade. I simply wanted to read it. I loved the powder-blue cover of this fat little mass-market book. I loved the realistic back-cover drawing, with the father and the son standing by the Grand Canyon (or some massive area of rock) with the sun streaming in on them and their beloved motorcycle. Or was it two motorcycles? What this book captured for me was a sense of heat coming off concrete as the sun comes up, particles of dust seen in a sunbeam, the interacti...more

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Wendy rated it:

(review of isbn 0688171664)

05/23/07

bookshelves: damngoodread

Read in January, 1993

According to family lore, my brother gave this book to my father when he - my brother - was in college. When my father read it, it apparently made a very deep impression on him, 'cuz he turned around and bought 4 copies and gave one to each of his children.

I refused to read it for years because...well...because my father gave it to me. Sometime after college though, I picked it up and read it for the first time and, for the next 5 years, I read it once a year every June. Clearly, it made a ...more

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Michael rated it:

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10/08/08

This book was recommended to me by a close friend when I was 18, but I was put off by the title. It seemed floofy and geeky at the same time. Years later when I decided to pick it up, I found out why. The book contrasts two perspectives on the world, call them romantic and classic or the artist's view and the engineer's view. One focuses on grooving in the moment and the other is obsessed with breaking things down and planning the future. Although if pressed, most people who know me well wo...more

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C. Benjamin rated it:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

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