This is a very odd and very well written book. I have mixed feeling about it. The downside—though it is a philosophy book, the author does not know very much about philosophy or science, and that gets irritating sometimes. He comes across as, if not anti-intellectual, then definitely anti-academic, and with that comes a weird smugness and posturing, not to mention factual errors.
But on the upside—his conversations on the subject of quality and excellence, are fantastic, and quite fascinating. It gave me a lot of food for thought, and gave me much to aspire to, both in my work (software development), and in life in general.
I highly recommend it.

This is one of the books which you have to bite off a little at a time, chew on it and come back for more after that.To be sure, it’s language is simple but it’s ideas are complex enough sometimes to make you reread a line or two again. A journey to be remembered.

This book is not really about Zen or motorcycle maintenance. What it’s really about is exellence and reason.

The story has three threads to it that are interwoven. The first thread is about a man on a motorcycle trip with his son. The second is about how a professor went insane. The third thread is a philisophical study of exellence and reason. The man on the motorcycle and the professor are different personalities of the same person. The professor went insane as he pursued the philosophy of excellence and reason.

This is drastically oversimplifying what is quite a complex book. It demands a lot of thought from the reader, particularly in relation to the philosophy. In that respect, it was really the wrong book for me to read at this time, since I didn’t have a lot of energy to put towards it.

Perhaps that was also the reason I found it rather slow to begin with. The philosophy seemed a bit didactic and the story around it was just that—a frame for the philosophy. It picked up a bit once the threads began to come together a bit more, particularly the philosophy and the professor. Overall, it failed to engage me in any great depth, however.

There were two other things that bothered me. First of all, I don’t know anyone that spends as much time maintaining their bike as the unnamed narrator does, and I know quite a few motorbikers. How many times does the oil need to be changed?

Finally, I was aware of how much society has changed since the book was written; the version I was reading was the 25th anniversary edition. This isn’t to say that the things talked of are irrelevant. Yet even so, I wasn’t completely convinced that they were entirely relevant either.

Overall, the book wasn’t at all what I expected and failed to engage me at the level it required.

This book took me ages to finish as it’s quite heavy going but in the end it had an immense impact on me. Loved it!