audiobooks

An excellent examination of the deep, nearly invisible, internal incongruities of Western society. Read it in my early twenties and it changed my life. When you read and understand the way our minds and hearts are programmed by our society, and how that programming leads us to goals that don't satisfy or unsuccessful pursuits of happines, it's almost a religious experience.

The reviews posted here don't call enough attention to the paradox Pirsig examines, and here it is:

you are brought up to believe that what is right, what is true, what is logical will prevail in the end. That logic is truth. The problem is that rhetoric overpowers logic, and rhetoric is the tool of those who further their dark ends by pushing our buttons -- buttons we don't even realize we have.

Sure, we all may look at that statement and say "Yeah, so what?" The beauty of this book is how it helps us get past that 'rhetorical' mind set, the "So What" mind set. Getting past it is no small feat. It's also hard to get past the smirks of your peers. This book helps you look inside yourself and realize not only where, but why you are making decisions and behaving in ways which prevent you from growing as a person and transcending the banality of consumption as a way of life.

When you finish reading this book and try to explain it to someone else, you will find yourself at a loss for words because there is virtually no vocabulary, no paradigm around which to discuss it. Yet another major paradox of our society. When you extend this line of thinking a bit, it becomes clear that the message in this book is not for glib conversation, a la Frazier Crane. You can't change other people much; but you can change yourself. And that's an internal conversation.

When I look at how ZAMM asks some painful, bedrock questions about our lives, I wonder where the answers are. The only book that seems to address some of the questions is Steven Covey's book on the Seven Ha! bits. Problem is, how do we un-program ourselves so we can move toward Covey's paradigm. I don't pretend to know the answer. So maybe we need the third book to complete the set for the modern philosopher.

This book demands multiple re-reading. It's the most profound book I've read in English.

Every twenty-something knows a thrity-something who claims this book changed their lives. They may very well be telling the truth, but I know far more people that put this book down in frustration than in rapture. Pirsig indeed captures a subtle, yet vital, way to engage reality in a mechanized and secular late 20th century. This book certainly must be credited for inspiring so much of the New Age literary spiritualism that followed it. But this book is not for everyone. Heavy doses of Kant and sweeping passages of rural landscapes have caused many a person to put it down thinking they've grasped the general idea, which is enough to discuss it at the next social gathering. This book, however, is a journey of the mind and the self at a particular moment in time. It is also a touching, and sometimes wrenching, acount of a man's own life. Pirsig's view of integrating technology into one's spiritual perspective is actually more interesting now than when he wrote it. It offers an immense amount to a prepared reader. But don't expect it to be an easy book offering any answers. It is a beautiful, though trying, process. If it doesn't grab you right away, don't be afraid to put it down for a few months. When the time is right, this book can be a centering experience.

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.