Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I heard about this one when I saw on a social networking site that it was one of my professor’s favorite books.  This was before I had his class and I shared some of his tastes in music, movies, and other books (e.g. Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist).  My opinion of him lowered after taking the class, but I remembered his choices and I decided to give Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZATAOMM) a try when I saw it was part of the limited audiobook collection at the Covina Library.  I needed something to get me through some cleaning chores.  ZATAOMM has a weird title but I read an excerpt and it seemed like an uplifting journey of self-discovery similar to The Alchemist.

My impression wasn’t entirely correct, however.  It is about a journey and about self-discovery, but not so much uplifting.  It jumps around between an account of the author’s cross country motorcycle trip, his descriptions of how he maintains his motorcycle, and his expounding on philosophy.  There isn’t much organization and a lot of digressing making it hard to follow.  I have no doubts about his high intelligence but can’t say that about his clarity.  With the word “zen” in the title I expected more about unity, calm, acceptance, and non-duality.  But the book seems to focus more on conflicts, divisions, categories, and differences.  He explains how his approach differs from his travelling companions.  He mentions his philosophy as actually someone else’s, an enigmatic figure he calls Phædras, who turns out to be an earlier alternate personality of his own.  I learned this through Internet research.  I found everything just too bizarre and disconcerting, insightful, but not the kind of insights I wanted to explore.

I made it through the first 3 of the 13 CD’s that comprised the audiobook.  I estimated that to be about 100 pages (the print copies of the book range from 380-449 pages), well above the rule of fifty.  I learned the rule of fifty from Nancy Pearl, a retired library and author from Seattle.  She wrote a book called Book Lust that suggests books for reading by many categories.  Book Lust also describes the “The rule of fifty” that state that “if you’re fifty years old or younger, give every book about fifty pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give it up.  If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100–the result is the number of pages you should read before deciding.”  Based on the rule, I’m giving up on ZATAOMM.  I’ll leave the Zen to the Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights and the art of motorcycle maintenance to the Harley Davidson store in West Covina.