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3.53 AVERAGE
3.53 AVERAGE
Really struggled with this book and sort of hated it. Then in the last 3rd I started enjoying it more. At this point im not sure how to feel about it
A man and his seemingly obtuse son go on a motorcycle road trip across the most boring but scenic parts of the United States. Nothing of particular interest ever happens but there are a lot of reflections about wrestling with questions of philosophy. Nothing of any useful or pragmatic philosophical use, mind you. I couldn't even describe the intertwining roadtrip and philosophical battles entertaining in the way you might engage in such rhetoric at a party in the 90s. In short, it was a pretentious, self-important slog that left me feeling like I'd wasted some valuable time I could have been reading something more meaningful.
I wish I had read book reviews before getting into this. I learned that I really dislike philosophy. There were some good bits too though; I liked the insights on technology and the reasons some people hate it. The discussion about gumption traps helped me understand why I get so frustrated sometimes with maintenance things and I think the knowledge will lessen those frustrations.
It's a pretty good novel and a pretty good philosophy essay put together in a very interesting way, making it more than the sum of those two parts. I'll be thinking about it and referencing it quite a lot in the future, I expect.
There’s a good story in here somewhere, one about a motorcycle journey across the States, a man's relationship with his son and his troubled past. But rather than being fully developed it’s used as a vehicle for the author to expound his philosophical ideas. Now, I’m not averse to a bit of philosophy, but if I’m going to read it I’m going to pick a well respect author, not the musings of some amateur, especially if they're about metaphysics, my least favourite field. Loads of people seem to like this book, but I’ve never seen it considered a significant work of philosophy, and having struggled through it I’m not surprised.
One of those life-changing books that shows how we think is much more complicated, and deserves much more examining, than we ever thought. What is Quality, anyway?!?!?!?!?
Like 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull', this is a book we're not supposed to like any more. When I read it, as a philosophy student, it totally blew me away, and I remember thinking when I was only a third of the way through that it couldn't possibly get any better and then it did.
With hindsight, I think I was taken in by the enthusiasm my friend who introduced me to it was showing for it back then. I also think that like the Richard Bach book mentioned above, if you read a book without knowing how it's generally received, you will often come to a different conclusion about it than the received wisdom, which makes me wonder how much any of our opinions are really reached independently and how much we are hypnotised by what others think.
Having said that, it never meshed with anything I was studying and it never has since, and it was slated by the other philosophy undergraduates I knew at the time as utterly vapid, particularly the phil and lit people, so apparently I was wrong. I still have no idea why.
With hindsight, I think I was taken in by the enthusiasm my friend who introduced me to it was showing for it back then. I also think that like the Richard Bach book mentioned above, if you read a book without knowing how it's generally received, you will often come to a different conclusion about it than the received wisdom, which makes me wonder how much any of our opinions are really reached independently and how much we are hypnotised by what others think.
Having said that, it never meshed with anything I was studying and it never has since, and it was slated by the other philosophy undergraduates I knew at the time as utterly vapid, particularly the phil and lit people, so apparently I was wrong. I still have no idea why.
a valuable read, but unbelievably heavy and perhaps not what I needed at this time...