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Comment by chanakya | Hacker News Reader

As a work of popular philosophy, I think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is unequalled. I think it got many people (including me) to an interest in philosophy where they had previously thought it to be boring hair-splitting.

I think the format - part travelogue, part novel, part philosophical exposition - is a big part of how he pulled that off.

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I loved it, aged about 20. Leila, not so much. It's a bit Marmite (people I think should love it hate it and vice versa). ZAMM came into my world just as I was figuring out (and mortified by) the fraud academia is, and the breakdown of his character Phaedrus was life-saving parable. His themes and ideas remain strong for me. The article author seems jaded with it (no doubt the recent notes are tedious and disappointing). Yes, Persig's style seems a bit laboured now. But it's a book of its time.

I feel like I missed something with the book. I read it about ten years ago and absolutely loved the travelogue part. His writing on travelling by motorcycle is excellent and I wanted more of it. The back half of the book where he really goes off on the metaphysics of quality didn't resonate at all with me.

I discarded the most detailed descriptions of the quality philosophy, and rather considered it as a great depiction of the character. The nervous breakdown would not have been as believable without the the depths of this wild goose chase.

In fact, this is what truly makes this book great.

Well said.

I'm right there with you. When he starts writing about Phaedrus, everything goes south in the book. He's talking about quality while needlessly adjusting his tappets every five minutes, then throwing shade at John. Treating every little incidental thing as a deep metaphor comes across as a little too on the nose and self-important for me.

Two attempted reads and I consider ZAMM one of the most overrated books of all time.

Phaedrus went literally insane and had electro-shock-therapy to "cure" the problem.

My take on the insanity is that it was connected to the "needless adjusting", "throwing shade" and "treating every little incidental thing as deep metaphor" among other things.

This was the biggest takeaway for me from this book -- roughly that an obsessive pursuit of quality (or definition of quality even) might take someone over the edge of sanity.

This is the effect it had on me, reading it in college. It was the first time I'd seen such a mental journey, and it meshed almost perfectly with how my mind was working at the time: that kind of vocally articulated walk through a series of connected ideas. Mainly it told me it was okay to do so, to get deeply into my head and follow my reasoning and observations and just work through it all.

I got a degree in philosophy because of that book, in which I came to understand that Pirsig's project around "quality" was an idiosyncratic mashup of zen and western perspectives. I still loved the book and reread it several times. For a certain overly cerebral person, it's a balm and a respite.

Always nice to see it get a mention, it made quite an impact on me at a formative age in the late 80s. As a bonus it then got me on to Thoreau, as he talks about reading Walden to his son in the book.

Oddly, I distinctly remember what in turn got me on to that then 15 year book in the the first place, a brief flash of the intriguing lotus-wrench cover in an episode of Inspector Morse, of all things.

Odd to think how a such a minor passing reference set me off so far down a road I probably would never have traveled otherwise.

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