I Suppose..
.
Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance"

The Loon has mentioned it but, I think, a lot of people here won't have even heard of it.

It's got little to do with motorbikes. It's got a lot to do with attitude.

Try it.

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Tue 20 May 2008, 14:19, 3 replies)

Strange that so many people
have never heard of that book, and that of those who have so many found it to be unreadable. It was a HUGE success in the 70s, so I thought it pretty famous...

I guess I can understand why so many people had trouble with it, though- it's pretty abstract a lot of the time, and the way he wrote it is as though he were writing two books at the same time- so you have the current time storyline of the motorcycle trip with his son spliced between chunks of following the story of Phaedrus and his ideas and conclusions. (Phaedrus, for those who haven't read the book, was how he referred to himself as he was in the past. He went mad and was given electroshock therapy, so he views that chunk of his life as being something lived by someone else, and is telling the story from third person as a result.) So you have a rather mundane description of the motorcycle trip that people might find uninteresting, then a chunk of metaphysics, then back to the trip. I find that when I re-read it I tend to skim through the bits about the trip with the Sutherlands and read more heavily the chunks of metaphysics.

It still made one hell of an impact on me as a teenager, though.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 20 May 2008, 15:52, closed)

^^
I did find it pretty dense.
The updated afterword at the end where he reveals his son was murdered is quite moving.
( Boss Keloid Got your mother's maiden name tattooed on my arm, Tue 20 May 2008, 16:03, closed)

It is very tough going.
Really, it took me about four times of re-reading it to really get all of it- there was a lot that went over my head as a teenager, but a lot that stuck with me on that first read, so it still had a lot of effect on me. But I was in my thirties before I really got all of it...

I understand why some consider it a load of pretentious wank- it's not an easy book. I also understand why those who have read it and really understood the whole thing have an almost evangelical need to proclaim its greatness, as it's very insightful.

Me, I highly recommend it, but understand why most don't slog all the way through. I do, however, feel that it should be taught as a college course and should be required reading for engineers in particular. I work with an awful lot of engineers who have gone so far into their left-brain world that they almost have no idea how the right-brain part of the world works, and in the process alienate a lot of humanity and turn into the characters that Dilbert parodies.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 20 May 2008, 16:19, closed)