Declare Books During Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus #1)
| Original Title: | Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance |
| ISBN: | 0060589469 (ISBN13: 9780060589462) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | Phaedrus #1 |
| Characters: | Phaedrus, Sylvia Sutherland, John Sutherland, Chris |
| Setting: | United States of America |
| Literary Awards: | National Book Award Finalist Nominee for Contemporary Affairs (1975) |
Robert M. Pirsig
Mass Market Paperback | Pages: 540 pages Rating: 3.77 | 186082 Users | 8159 Reviews
Narration In Favor Of Books Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus #1)
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 by 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 likable. 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.
Identify Based On Books Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus #1)
| Title | : | Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus #1) |
| Author | : | Robert M. Pirsig |
| Book Format | : | Mass Market Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Anniversary Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 540 pages |
| Published | : | April 25th 2006 by HarperTorch (first published April 1974) |
| Categories | : | Fiction |
Rating Based On Books Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus #1)
Ratings: 3.77 From 186082 Users | 8159 ReviewsJudgment Based On Books Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus #1)
The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.Robert M. Pirsigs brilliant 1974 novel about a father and son motorcycle ride across the west, from Minnesota to California is also a journey for the reader. We examine this fictionalized autobiography in terms of relationships, unreliable narrators, delusions, mental illness, and ultimately about trueness with ones self.The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm lookingOK, 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. It
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 very
I'm convinced this is one of those books that somehow made it onto the high school syllabus and just sort of stuck around, with no one ever examining its right to be there. This then created the unwarranted impression that Pirsig's text is a 'classic' or something approaching significance. I say this with only slight reservation, but I don't think there is any kind of genius, misunderstood or otherwise, to be found in this bloviated acid trip. Pirsig warns in the author's note not to expect an
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
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
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle MaintenanceThere are parts of this book, and parts of this type of book I really enjoy. But at the exact same time, this whole genre of book (see: Ken Wilber and his oeuvre, especially A Brief History of Everything) really grinds and irritates.* Don't get me wrong, I love Greek philosophy and Zen Buddhism as much as the next guy (or gal) on
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