audiobooks

I've had to buy 3 copies of this book. The first two were loaned to friends who never returned them. Yes, it's a great book. It's not about Zen or motorcycles. It is about quality, values, and relationships.

I first read ZMM 18 years ago, at age 17. Since then, I've been impressed by 3 things about the book: 1)It's one of those books that you can pick up after not touching for 5 years, and end up spending hours rereading sections on a rainy afternoon. 2) It's one of those books that when you meet someone who also read & loved it, and then discuss it with them, it always seems that they got something different out of it than you did. 3) You can pick it up after not reading it for 10 years, re-read it, and it's as though you've just read a completely different book.

Many reviewers here have stated that reading the book changed their lives. I read it at a pretty impressionable time, so I can't say as how my life would've been different if I hadn't read it. I do believe though that reading the book did teach me at least one absolute truth: There are two types of people in the world- people who love ZMM, and people who "just don't get it". If I'm ever marooned on an island with one other person, I pray it's one of the former.

A Japanese biologist wrote about this book in a Japanese magazine as
follows: Many years ago when she was studying in England and going to
buy a motorcycle, one of her colleagues recommended her to read this
book, but it was not really a book on motorcycle maintenance but a
book that taught philosophy in a simple manner. She liked this book
and read it repeatedly.

Reading this story and finding that the
twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this book was published in
paperback, I bought a copy and began to read it by expecting to learn
something about philosophy or the history of philosophy. To some
extent, this expectation made me read the book quickly in an effort to
get to possible chapters where the teaching of philosophy might be
fully given. Even without such a motivation, however, one could read
this book speedily, because the story magically enchants the reader
and because the style of Pirsig's writing is very readable even to the
non-native speaker of English who, like me, has read only a small
number of novels in English.

Surely, descriptions of classical
philosophies and contemporary philosophical problems are given in
parallel with the story of motorcycle traveling, I have found that
this is essentially a novel, which invokes ideas about the
reunification of art and technology and about the quality of life. The
great point of the book is that it can also be enjoyed as a book
on philosophy, though descriptions of ancient Greek philosophies in
later chapters are not very understandable. In the last chapters the
story of a relation between a father and his son reaches a moving
climax.

Ugh. This book can't decide what it wants to be. Every time you get interested in a topic (and this book does contain some interesting topics from the travel narrative to some of the ideas expressed) it switches over to another topic before resolving anything. This is incredibly frustrating from the point of view of entertainment. Does this book want to be a novel and flow like one, or a middle-brow discussion of contemporary worldviews, or a amateur philosophy thesis? It suceeds only in being a very long and slow 400+ pages of several seperate books thrown together with minimal integration.