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nineteenthly 's review for:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
by Robert M. Pirsig
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.