Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Book Reviews

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DOES NOT feature a Reader’s Guide. Contrary to the description, this 25th anniversary Quill addition DOES NOT feature a Reader’s Guide; it DOES NOT include discussion topics, an interview with the author, and letters and documents detailing how this extraordinary book came to be. Save you money and buy the $2.00 edition.

Mind blown!!. This is the best book I ever read. Essential reading for anyone. It’s the first book I want to read again and made notes to remind myself to read again

I thought it was a Quality book.. That's all.

Awesome. I read this book 174 years ago. Never gets old.

Must read!. To zoombies, it came out in 1974. Don't how many times I've read it but I get something from it every time. I think I start again today!

One of the best!. It's been about 25 years since I first read it, and each time I get something new! I can't give it enough stars. Buy it now!

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. A high Quality read 5/5

Captivating. It’s my 3rd time reading this book and at different stages in my life. I am in my 50’s now. Amazing how the same words can bring new meaning.

Very good but what's up with the 25 years?. The book is excellent and a decimate must buy but the other guy wrote that it had been 25 years since he read it last and I hate to be contradictory but I was under the impression it was fairly new... Like three years or so.. but at any rate I'm sure it will still be a classic 25 years from now so thank you for the early review random person!

Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Read this book 40 years ago & enjoyed it. Now having read it again I realised back then I didn't understand half of it and now enjoyed it much more. It's a story of madness and disconnection, sanity and love woven in and out to make an intriguing picture to be seen from quite different perspectives.

Read this again for the first time.. I attempted this gem of a book back in the 70's when I was in my 20's. I had no sense of real identity or purpose. I went through the actions to impress my girlfriend, got bogged down, and never finished. Thankfully, I resisted any temptation to read ahead to see what happens. I'm now in my early 60's, have succeeded at fatherhood (my son Alex is now 33, adequately happy and both financially and spiritually successful no thanks to me), and failed miserably at marriage. Somehow I am still married to Alex's mom and have come to a new understanding about what in life is of lasting importance. It took a 40 year struggle with alcoholism, anger, fear and resentment to arrive at a place I can only think of as heaven on Earth. Enter ZATAOMM. So many things are moving me to tears these days and this enlightened journey across the Northwest on motorcycle with son in tow was no exception. A brilliant read. Just when you think you might lose your mind navigating through the web of metaphysical, spiritual, philosophical enlightenment, the author draws you back to the well crafted descriptions of his travels across the Dakotas, Montana, and to the Pacific coastline so you can breathe again. Back and forth, up and down, side to side this work takes you in so many directions and forces so many emotional reactions that run the gamut. It truly is a work for all time. gl

This Book Will Change Your Life. Whatever the cost - digital or tangible - this book is worth worth it.

A Classic. so glad to see this book pop up after reading it in high school in the 70s. Don’t miss this opportunity to snag this at 1.99, it will make you happy.

A timeless masterpiece. This is my bible.

Great book. I have read this book twice, the last time 20 years ago, and wanted to make it my first iPad (electronic) read. But the price is prohibitive. I will just dust off the paperback and read it for the 3rd time. I will look for another classic which is priced to sell. This is a worthwhile read though.

Book changed?. Read this book many years ago in hardcover. I loved it! I finally got around to purchase the digital addition, and read the author’s opening note about what he had changed to make the book better, which made me nervous. How could he make it better? He didn’t!

Don't Forget It's Sequel. Zen was good. It helped us understand the world in a different way than before. But don't forget the sequel to this book. It was also written by Pirsig. A lot of people say it doesn't live up to ZAMM, but I actually like it more. The book is: Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals And for those that don't know, Chris is dead. Stabbed to death by an unknown person in San Francisco. I didn't personally know him, but I felt like I did thru ZAMM, and was stunned when I learned of this.

A Fascinating Read--Several, Actually. I just reread Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM), forty years after the first time in college. It's a different book seen through the eyes of a 65-year-old man, particularly one who was a philosophy major, Methodist seminary graduate, licensed family therapist, and who practices Zen meditation. For me, ZMM was several books. Like many contemporary novels that constantly shift from scene to scene to keep our attention, ZMM shifts constantly—multiple times in most chapters—between a philosophical story and a psychological, interpersonal one. Much of its power derives from the fact that ZMM is based on Pirsig's own life. Others have well-summarized the “plot”, so I won't reiterate that. 1) ZMM is a philosophical novel. Pirsig was an English professor and teacher of Rhetoric, a blend of writing, persuasion and philosophical argument. The book recalls Pirsig's multi-year search to define Quality. Heavy on the Greek philosophers, Pirsig presents argument after argument, originating in a variety of settings, through a series of daily chautauquas, over the course of his motorcycle road trip with his young son in 1960's America. Pirsig is quite good at the metaphor/smilie game, relating many of his arguments to how one keeps a motorcycle running. The “Zen” part of the book is that the Quality Pirsig seeks to define is less a matter of “either-or” (rational vs romantic thinking) and more like something else, represented by Plato's Forms (eidos), or the Buddha's thinking. As a former philosophy major and a Zen meditator, this is familiar territory to me. My difficulty with ZMM was that Pirsig is a lot smarter than I and often left me in the dust of his arguments. Like a lot of brilliant people, he is also arrogant and convinced that his views are correct and nearly all others, stupid. Another reviewer of the book noted that non-philosophers are often awed by Pirsig's reasoning, while those who know a bit about philosophy are less so. Nonetheless, the philosophical part of this novel was a fun ride. 2) ZMM is also a psychological journey. Early on it become clear that Pirsig was quite obsessive. One of my Old Testament professors remarked that “Fundamentalism is less a theological position than a psychological problem.” Pirsig often exhibited something like fundamentalist zeal. As I read ZMM, I wondered if Pirsig's dogmatic certainties weren't as much a function of his psychological issues—his compulsive nature—as anything else. Over the course of the book, Pirsig related how his thinking became clearly obsessive , occupying his mind 18, 20, 22 hours per day, until he could no longer sleep. Pirsig crashes and burns, is diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic, is hospitalized several years and receives shock treatments. He is open about all this, and about the damage it does to his relationships, particularly with his own son, Chris, his companion on this journey. A recurrent theme is Pirsig's fear that Chris' psychological makeup parallel's his own. A fascinating aspect of all this is the psychological distance that forms between the narrator Pirsig and his former self, whom he calls Phaedrus (also the name of a Platonic dialog). After hospitalization and treatment, Pirsig has forgotten a lot about Phaedrus, and the psychological track of ZMM recounts the slow recovery of Pirsig's memories about Phaedrus' earlier decline. As I followed Pirsig's no-holes-barred recounting of this decline, I often had the sense I was watching a slow-motion psychological and interpersonal train wreck. ZMM is a difficult read, but an excellent one. Chris, whom I had grown to love in the book, was murdered some years after the book's publication, and ZMM's Afterword contains an interesting glimpse of how Pirsig's mind and psyche continued to evolve after ZMM was published.

Well done. Thought provoking.. The personal recount of the journey is a very interesting and a powerful adventure of the spirit and the mind. I also purchased this ebook after first reading this book 34 years ago. I yearned to reread this. I felt a profound empathy and relearned again of the many aspects of life. The intertwined thoughts and rationale made me think deeply again. Through the years I have thought of this book and never forgot the suggestion of how to best travel - I won’t give it away. I caution you to not read the very lengthy reviews by a couple of persons (July 31 and December 13) since they do a disservice of giving the ending away and not having the courtesy of indicating a “spoiler alert”. This lack of etiquette is poorly missing in those reviews. I hope this remark will make your reading that much more enjoyable by avoiding those reviews.

Too psychological for me. I couldn’t make myself finish this. It became all about psychology and didn’t seem to have much story to go along with it

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