Rating: 
Summary: Horribly dull
Review: Read an over padded book about the reasons of "quality" versus aesthetic. In short, the author goes in endless circles and I wondered why I was reading the book to begin with. Some very absurd statements are printed in this book that I had a horrible time trying to agree with. I can't with a good mind recommend this to anyone. If you want to be philosophical, there are many other books that's points are much more valid than this.
Rating: 
Summary: Worth the effort
Review: Just finished reading ZAMM for the third time. Once again, I got something different from this great book. ZAMM is inspiring, challenging, difficult, fun, thought-provoking ... it requires you to THINK. It isn't an easy read, but it is well worth the effort. The last time I finished reading ZAMM, I persuaded three friends (all intelligent people) to read it. They all hated it. Go figure.
Rating:
Summary: Dont take it all at face value
Review: I just wanted to say that although this book is a work of great importance and genius on its own, and can be very valuable without any knowledge of zen, an understanding of some zen principles can bring on a whole new level of comprehension of the book (and no, you dont have to be a buddhist for this to help). A good place to start is with the writings of d.t. suzuki. Although his writings are many years old now, the language is timeless, and his simple, reverent style is very readable. Read his Introduction to Zen, and then read this book again. Youll be amazed at what you missed the first time around.
Rating:
Summary: Fine Tuning Your Life
Review: Sitting in the sunlight, seeing others darkly in the shade. The universal human experience of separateness and differentness during interactions with others. Experience as experience instead of scorekeeping. Noticing what is being experienced while it is being experienced. Dispassionate. Interested observing of one's own feelings, thoughts, imagination; one's own life. The human experience from a high place of observation.
Fearlessly describing human fear.
Joyously presenting human exuberance. Telling us the story of human frustration in challenges that don't go away, until - like the eventual choice of focusing on one brick of a building of bricks in a block of buildings - we get to the absolute simplicity of the situation and see clearly. Within this new view, this new thought, this new action, is a new life and a new choice and another step in the direction of being our self. A man discovers the spiritual world is not the world of the dead. He discovers it is not up there somewhere but right here, right now and he discovers that he has been a ghost of his real self. The Holy Grail is his own body and the Quest is to be his real self buried under layers of habits of thought frightened into him by past experience. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of the great books of our time. I read it more than twice and listened to it on tape. It is an inspired work.
Rating:
Summary: This book changed my life.
Review: Pirsig takes such an amazing approach to this book. He encompasses everything in our modern world. How and why everything we have created exists as it does is explained in this book. The night after I finished it the whole thing came into view and I understood our reality in a new way. QUALITY has become a word with more meaning than I could have ever imagined, and it has become such a powerful word that I cannot even really believe it, but Pirsig lays it all out for all of us to see. READ THIS AMZING BOOK!
Rating:
Summary: A must read..
Review: Had heard abt this book, back in college..somehow slipped my thought for a while. Bumped into this on the shelfs of B&N, picked it up without a second thought...
The way the author has dealt with some fundamental aspects of life, its very insightful...definitely not a philosophical take on life..but the mundane things that we see and do in our lifes are dealt with in amazing clarity. Did it change my life? hard to say, but i did bookmark a lot of pages..for future reference. A must read, and definitely worth a re-read.
Rating: 
Summary: like nietzsche said
Review: the story of one man's journey to the origins of modern occidental thought, pirsig attempts to diagnose modern man's vapid condition and find a cure. zen and the art... is the tale of phaedrus, "the wolf," who favors intuition before reason, concluding the foundation of all thought is emotion, the primary reality. the problem is, so few today recognize the importance and value of emotions. having deified reason and demonized passion, individuals have lost any authentic zest for life; they are mere sheep. simply adjust the definition of "what is good?" and recognize that which is good cannot be rigidly defined rationally by some shepherd--i.e. jesus--who knows best, but rather must be intuited and expressed naturally--like a wolf--beyond the bounds of what the shepherd deems safe. the wolf is liberated, living dangerously, free to wander in solitude wherever, slave to none. pirsig has a real eye for beauty and an almost-hemingway skill with words. the book is an excellent read, but the author is not as revolutionary as he makes himself out to be: his epiphany is shared by many, especially by nietzsche and the existentialists. another re-valuation of values, updated.
Rating: 
Summary: Not life changing- but a very good read
Review: After stubbornly resisting this book for 25 years because of the silly pop culture that surrounds it, I finally broke down and read it last week. No coffee shop, no backpack in the student union - just me and the book in the suburbs. It was good - very good. Did it change my life? No, absolutely not. For a better search on 'what it all means' read Gregg Easterbrook's Beside Still Waters ,and for the fascination with our day to day lives, I prefer the first two Nicholson Baker novels. Nevertheless, I still highly recommend this book. The interspersion of the trip with Pirsig's study of values is quite well done. The Greek philosophy covered and subsequent personal interpretation more than makes up for some of the hippie stuff didn't age all that well. Another plus was the trip itself, which is much better than just about any road book before or since. While my good - but not life altering -review certainly heaps more praise than the one star ones found here, it appears such middle ground is a minority position in these parts. Still, I'll stick with 3.5 stars. Once I waded through the hype and cult like following, I am glad I finally read this modern classic.
Rating:
Summary: Inquiry, not Fiction
Review: A number of the readers who ranked this book poorly seemed to think they had read a novel, though the author says immediately that "it must be regarded in its essence as fact." The narrator, Pirsig, is a man in early middle age, once a teacher of rhetoric and technical writing at Montana State in Bozeman. While there he became interested in the philosophical pursuit of an objective standard of quality or value (a larger form of the discipline of aethetics); this became an obsession when he entered graduate school at the University of Chicago, and the narrator eventually suffered a severe nevous breakdown. In a mental asylum he received 28 shock treatments over two years, destroying much of his memory. At the time of the motorcycle "chatauqua" that frames this book he has rebuilt his life, working as a a technical writer. He has remarried, fathered two children and come to think of himself as a wholely different person. He calls his earlier self "Phaedrus," (the wolf) somewhat ironically after a character in a Socratic dialogue. The trip that reunites him with places and people not seen in years allows Pirsig a good deal of time to meditate on Phaedrus, to try to piece together his former life and how he careened toward insanity. Early in the book is an intimation, that his 11-year son, riding pillion on the cycle during the entire trip, is showing early signs of mental illness. This does not make him easier on the boy; he is instead surprsingly strict, bossy, even competitive, which makes him a vivid if often diasagreeable first-person narrator. (Chris Pirsig did suffer a breakdown, and lived only till about 20; he was still alive when ZAMM was published, however.) I go into this at length because many of these reviews seem to ignore the fact that there is a solid overall narrative structure to the book--this, I think, is useful for potential readers to know, together with the fact that it is an unusual and honest memoir of a man who has had a difficult life.
Rating:
Summary: Expected more...
Review: Perhaps the most overrated book in pop culture. Interesting, yes, definitely. A treatise of philosophical merit or anything of any philosophical interest certainly not. Reading it will only confuse and over simplify what the great thinkers such as Kant tried to achieve. Likely this book says the most about what can happen when an intelligent person lives in a small Western college town.
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