"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values" by Robert M. Pirsig

Yes!  I read a book.  It was hard.  Really hard.  This novel hooked me in the first few pages but I had to take repeated "brain rests" along the way.  It isn't really a book about zen.  It does have a good bit of motorcycle maintenance in it, but that information is provided as metaphor more than for practicality.  While most people remember the title, it is the subtitle which has the most importance here.  So what is this book about?  After 406 pages all I can say is that I'm not really sure.  It's about a lot of things.  It's about nature, about a road-trip, about a father trying to connect with his son, and with himself and his past.  It's about philosophy and it is about madness.  Pirsig presents this tome as a semi-real version of events surrounding a road-trip he made in the early 1970s.  He frames the narrative as a "Chautauqua", a kind of entertaining learning experience, and internal monologues become lectures to explain and define his theories.  He goes deep into the roots of philosophy, drawing from it the conclusion that life is about "Quality", something we know exists but cannot define.  Using a wealth of knowledge the book had me scrambling to learn more about the early Greeks and modern day theorists on the nature of truth, goodness, and more.  It was very deep reading.  I had to read passages over and over then set the book down to think about what I had just read.  There were tremendously insightful sections and parts which were nearly undecipherable.  Pirsig's observations of the world around him and need to understand the underpinnings of existence could be exhausting.  They did, in fact, drive the brilliant author to an insane asylum in the early 1960s where he received electroshock which effectively wiped some of his memories of the fanatical breakdown he suffered while trying to prove his thesis over that of academia of the 1950s.  While the zealotry he expresses in his "new church of reason" can be hard to take, his reflections also include tremendous insights.  Take this passage, which is possibly more relevant today than when it was written.  He notices a good deal of loneliness in people of the big cities, and says "Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices ... but I hope it's been made plain that the real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity."  When he talked of "truth" winning out over "good" in the minds of Greek philosophers I couldn't help but wonder what he would think about the United States at this time, when "truth" has taken quite the hit.  It was a hugely engaging and slightly frustrating book, and one I might return to someday, as I may want to start over with an understanding of what it is trying to say.  In the meantime, I think I need to bone up on some basic philosophy to help with the context.