This book kinda blew my mind. Very original the way he combined the stories of the motorcycle trip, his past life and mental breakdown, and philosophical exploration. I felt like there was a sense of suspense and drama, even though a lot of the story could be described as dry on the surface. Really sad to hear about his son Chris getting stabbed and dying a few years after the book was published.
It's hard to say what exactly the message of the book is, but for me the takeaway is the "good" or high-quality life is one where one strives to be engaged holistically with life and fully with tasks in the moment.
Don't think it's going to end up on my all-time favorites but definiely a worthwhile read for me.
by scallopini
42 Comments
The first time I tried, I just couldn’t get into *Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*, and DNF.
I picked it up again 10 years later, and it’s maybe my favorite novel. I think I just wasn’t ready for it when I first tried.
His other novel *Lila* is also great, and maybe even more thought provoking.
It’s so wild that I just opened Reddit and your post is the first one I saw. I’ve read this book twice and I’m actually writing about it right now. I love his whole approach and the way the book’s ideas burrow in and stay with me. I couldn’t get into *Lila* but I’ve tried a few times.
I really didn’t like it, probably not smart enough to “get it”. Oh well.
I had to read it in a high school philosophy class. I don’t remember specifics, but it was quite a ride hehe.
This book is one of the rarest cases when I started and completely lost interest. It seemed very boring to me. That was about 27 years ago so I may give it another try.
Probably the book I’ve read the most over my life. Every ten years or so I pick it up again and re-read and get something new from it.
Don’t ever attempt Lila though (his next book)
I remember reading this book for a class in high school.
It was a real love/hate experience- loved the class, hated the book. Was a great lesson in critical thinking for me.
Definitely one of my favorites. It changed my life. Now, unless it requires true specialized knowledge, I will do my best to repair, restore, and maintain anything I own. I’m currently working on a 50 year old turntable that belonged to my grandfather. Ever since I read the book, I have properly and professionally patched tires, replaced water pumps and alternators, replaced truck door handles, and repaired a botched attempt at cutting loose my catalytic converter from the same truck.
It is important to me that I can repair things on my own, and appreciate the the beauty of the original work as well as the work I accomplished keeping everything working.
I also am a heavy reader, so I love fiction, philosophy, history, science, and digestible mathematics.
Edit: Forgot to mention that I learned how to break down doors on multiple types of vehicles to replace mirrors knocked off by distracted or inactive drivers.
I really wish I were smart enough to get more out of it. I slogged thru it but felt I didn’t get most of it.
It seemed like this book was just some guy trying to find his way out of his mental breakdown, which is fine, but his essays about quality at the time struck me as some stoner philosophy you might have with your buddies over a campfire and then laugh about it the next morning. It was a slog and I am not sure how people get anything out of it (if you do though, good for you, genuinely don’t want to discount anyone’s experience reading).
Quality. What is quality. That seems to be the theme to me. A very good book.
I based my art thesis in art school off of this book. It’s incredibly important and has made a huge impact on my life.
Before assembling rotisserie, you must first start with peace of mind.
It is literally the only book I have never finished because it is just so boring
This is a very quality post.
Loved it when I read it 35ish years ago. However, when polling others, it might have the worst “started it” to “finished it” ratio of any book!
Check out “The Dancing Wu Li Masters”. I think it is much better than Motorcycle.
I loved it, at the time it felt like it was written for me; I rode my motorcycle most of the year, my job was QA, I mostly read philosophy, had some mental health issues, overall, tied a lot of stuff together for me. Definitely a treat.
I had to sit and think about a random paragraph from it for like an hour, go about my day mulling over a page. It’s a philosophy book IMHO not a novel. An in depth analysis of what he calls Quality, as far as it goes for me, an elusive aspect of existence, what Castaneda called Intent, many takes on it in literature. Fascinating food for thought.
Book fucked me up. Especially his daughter part in the very end….
We read Zen and the Art when I was in college in the 1980s studying philosophy, for an informal seminar. I could not finish the book. I just felt like there is something seriously wrong with this guy that I can’t put my finger on.
It reminds me of Venture to the Interior, by Laurens van der Post, which is another book that I found disturbing and could not finish although I was not sure why. Van der Post has been called a fabulist –a liar essentially– since his death.
Nothing about the two books is similar except for the feeling i got from them.
So, just my take.
I’m glad you enjoyed it and found something worthwhile in it.
I read this book over the summer and it was a chore for me to finish. I picked it up based on some reviews on Reddit that stated it changed their lives. But I think it’s the only book I’ve ever read where I can say that I hated it.
Fun fact: Pirsig never once mentions which make and model of motorcycle he rides in Zen and the Arr of Motorcycle Maintenance.
I DNFed this a few months ago. I think I was about a third of the way through and I really wasn’t vibing with it
It seems like it’s polarizing. But if you enjoyed it, I recommend Lila by the same author. I liked Zen, but I loved Lila. It is something that probably not many people will appreciate though, even among the Zen enthusiasts crowd.
ZMM was introduced to me, surprisingly, in a remedial English class in high school. I was a lazy student and had to take it alongside a regular English class to have enough credits to graduate.
I don’t remember what I felt during the first time I read it, just that it seemed to click with my personal ideas of how to live life and experience the world. On subsequent readings his ideas on Quality, how to see and feel it, what it imbues into reality, and how to create and apply it in our own worlds shaped a lot of how I approached my life. I’m a professional mechanic and the ideas of mixing the beauties of the Classical and Romantic approaches along with the root concept of Quality drastically changed how I repaired cars and viewed doing any sort of work. The section where Pirsig talks about school being more like a church and how a person with a true desire to learn will go seek knowledge at his own pace was vindicating as well, because it took me a few years of doing my own thing before wanting to restart in college.
I tend to read the book once a year. At the very least chapters twenty-five and twenty-six, because I think they apply the best to general living. I also teach automotive fundamentals at a junior college, and ZMM is on my recommended reading list for my students.
Check richard bach and carlos castanetta too. They all give me similar vibes in a certain light.
I was a natural philosophy minor in college…and I ride adventure motorcycles. This book can be a bit difficult to “get into”, but once immersed, it can be quite transformative. I read this book again recently and really enjoyed the discourse regarding Kant vs Hume and how we perceive our world (and if a priori knowledge exists). I also particularly liked the following passage. Having thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail I encountered may hikers, struggling with various personal demons, that seemed to be stuck in this mentality…
“Many explorers are likely to miss that proverbial passage of sunlight through the trees. They look up the trail to see what’s ahead even when they know what’s ahead because they just looked a second before. They are here, but yet not here. They reject the here, and are unhappy with it, and want to be further up the trail. But when they get there, they will be just as unhappy because then IT will be “here”. What they are looking for and want is actually all around them, but they don’t want that because it IS all around them. Every step is an effort both physically and spiritually, because they imagine their goal to be external and distant.”
One interesting side note, I actually took the initiative, and learned how to adjust my motorcycle valves because of this book! But despite all of this, I can certainly see how reading a book where the primary theme is the concept of “Quality,” might not be everyone’s cup of tea. I have not read “Lila: An Inquiry into Morals” yet, but it’s definitely on my list.
As an Engineer (software), this book made a lot of sense to me. I think if you are inclined towards technical fields, you might like this book. It made me stop and notice if something was the right tool for the job, the wrong tool for the job, or the perfect tool for the job.
I saw parallels with the Total Quality Management program popular decades ago. Although at most companies it became just another management fad, I think at its origin, it had similar ideas as ZMM.
I absolutely hate that book. As someone who is working towards a religious studies degree, I have to read so much philosophy, and this is one of the few books that I actively hate. I’m very glad you like it. I’m happy people are able to get something out of this that I just couldn’t
I read it when I was in high school and loved it. It felt like it opened my eyes and I learned to look for quality in life and work.
But then I read it 30 years later and all I could think was, what an a-hole. He’s really a narcissist. I won’t be recommending it to my kids.
Psuedo-intellectual philosophical drivel.
The main character is insufferable, and he’s an asshole to everyone around him. It reeks of the author’s superiority complex. DNF
One of my favorites. I try to read it every ten years or so. The book resonates differently as you age.
The part on the scientific method and troubleshooting is one of the best discussions of how u actually do science in literature.
I read it in high school and enjoyed it because it was written in first person: it felt so immediate and approachable. I enjoyed his conflicts with his teachers and fellow faculty. The bits of philosophy that I understood felt important, but most of it was boring and incomprehensible to me. I thought his kid was weird.
I read it in my late twenties and mostly enjoyed the philosophy. The section on gumption resonated the most. It helped me move forward with some aspects of my life that had seemed stuck. The narrator seemed arrogant but I didn’t mind. IIRC, I still didn’t understand the kid.
I just read it this summer in my forties. I could see my recently deceased grandfather in the narrator: not that they were similar personalities, but that he was of the same generation, and had similar values. My uncle talked about his pained, redemptive relationship with his dad at the funeral, and there were quite a few parallels. So I felt really bad for his kid. And for him, for losing his son after the end of the novel.
I remember sitting in a side room reading this, with a bow tie, hoping to get the attention of a girl I liked. Unfortunately, she didnt see me as an intellectual … maybe because I’m a gangly goggle eyed freak
Very important book for me—helped me learn to rationalize problems and avoid gumption traps. I am also named after the son (Chris).
ITT are many, many people who haven’t finished it, but claim they hate it, and others who think the author is actually making a point about philosophy. It’s a book about a mentally ill person trying to make their way through the world. And though the protagonist is similar to the author, they’re not the same.
If you want to read it, approach it as a story, a perspective of one broken person. Listen to how the protagonist is *so sure* that they are right and the rest of the world is not. That’s not the author making some grand claim, they’re just describing the picture through the eyes of the protagonist.
I’m very sure that the author had similar experiences to his protagonist (I think I remember reading that), but it’s still a novel about a fictional person.
I read it as a teen and found it annotated by my own father.
There were heavy hints that he was identifying with the protagonist.
Only problem is my father has no interest in seeking help, he gaslit my mother for two decades, had an unhealthy interest in young women/girls, and everything was always someone else’s fault.
As of now he’s living out his retirement in another country and still trying to gaslight my mother into thinking that he’s fundamentally a good man.
So yeah, read it through once, don’t need to return to it.
I’m really surprised at how many people didn’t like this book. I loved it, though I read it 30 years ago. I want to go reread it now.
Am I the only one who was deeply disturbed by how he treated his son? He’s dragging this little kid along with him and making him be the mature one – doing all this disturbing stuff and ignoring the kid when he was upset. F’ed the kid up in real life.
I couldn’t read the book, I kept getting so mad at Pirsig for being such an ass to his kid.
Read the whole thing, seemed like you could’ve covered everything interesting the writer had to say in one or two philosophy lectures. Definitely didn’t earn its length.