One of my passions is reading. I love to read anything really, but I mainly seem to be drawn to classic fiction, philosophy, and informative books written on subjects that I follow. If you see me walk into a bookstore, you’ll notice that in most cases I walk right past the new bestsellers and murder mystery section without even a glance. Books written by authors not from my time seem to give me the most interest. It gives a different perspective on life being able to look through another’s eyes seeing into a world that existed long before I ever came into this world.

So I thought that I might share with you my thoughts on books that I’ve recently read and some that I’ve read in the past that I think are noteworthy. I’ll start with a book that I’ve just finished, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.

Published in 1974, the book follows the journey of the author who is riding East to West across the country on his motorcycle, with his 11 year old son, Chris. Together they ride mile after mile through the changing scenery from the plains of the Dakotas to the shores of California. Stopping at what seems to be a never-ending supply of roadside diners and stopping to fix the mechanical hurdle that his motorcycle occasionally throws at him.

If you’re going to look for this book on a bookstore shelf you won’t find it in the non-fiction or biography section. You’ll have to venture to the philosophy section instead. Pirsig uses the story of their trip and stops to fix the bike as a segway to talk on what the book is really about, an inquiry into values. He goes deep into mind vs. matter, subjectivity vs. objectivity, and how quality is the beginning of it all. Changing the very way that we look at the world and the way that we live. He challenges Aristotle’s way of putting everything into neat categories and makes us look at the underlying existence of everything and why we view things the way that we do.

One area that he covered that I especially found interesting was his talks on gumption, our confidence to do something, and the traps that we can encounter that makes us lose that gumption. Things like ego, anxiety, and setbacks can all be gumption traps. As simple as that sounds, it made me stop and think of why I would sometimes feel defeated while trying to complete a daunting task. Then I could see the trap for what it was and that would in turn help me move past it.

In reading about the author, Chris, and Phaedrus (a character that I’m not going to delve into) I feel that I’ve learned a lot, and I think that I look at the world a little differently, in a way that helps me understand it a little better. At first, I thought that it would be hard to tell what this book is about, being that it discusses art, technology, ancient Greece, religion, human relationships, and philosophy. Then it came to me, this book is about everything.

The afterword in the 1981 publishing, caught me off guard and makes me sad to think about how this world sometimes works. It makes you appreciate the little time you have to experience this world. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who has yearning to look at the world in a different way.