This book will become one of my favorites very soon. I'm just finishing to read it.
It is amazing how easy the writer drives the story and gets in to deep topics and conflicts of our daily life. That makes the book a great source of common sense and wisdom and makes easier to understand the reality.
If you are a person interested into find out the source of many problems or conflicts this book can be very helpful.If you would like to expand your criteria for analysing different realities this book can be helpful.
It is a bit too long but it is so easy to read... For sure I will read it more than once to find details I couldn't keep before.
I'm even using the book for supporting my work like manager. It helps me to make evident some kind of problems and supports very good the process of finding solutions.

Maybe there has been too much hype about this book, or maybe it's just been out too long and it's all common sense to me by now since these ideas are more in the mainstream than they might have been in 1974. I found the book to be rather trite and condescending, with not much to reveal in they way of new ideas or modes of thought. It was also extremely repetitive and Pirsig takes forever to get simple points across to the reader.

My brother read it on one day and loves it. He's already re-reading the book and he's only had it a month. Great for 'deep-thinkers' and 'spiritually curios'.

The character Jake on 2 1/2 men was asked by his father what the book "Lord of the flies" was about and he repied, "a really big fly." Continuing with that thought, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is not about motorcycles and how to fix them. The book is an outstanding search of self and and the healing of a relationship. An old standard that holds up in time; it should be on a must read list with the best of literature.

I read the first part of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance" with great enjoyment and excitement. Finally,
someone found a way to write about philosophy in a way that
makes it interesting and accessible to the average
reader... quite an achievement. But it was too good to last.

In the second part Pirsig begins to talk about 'quality'
and the whole book disintegrates -- because while Pirsig
has a genius for explaining the ideas of the great
philosophers, his own contribution to the field is
less than adequate. 'Quality' as an absolute concept,
an objective measurement, a new dimension? C'mon, give
us a break! 'Quality' is as culturally-bound,
subjective, nebulous as you can get. You have to be a
very insular American to think otherwise.

The third part of the book, Pirsig's adventures in
academia, reads like the diary of a crank. Apparently
Pirsig's ideas did not find much favor in the harsh,
skeptical light of the universities, so he took them
directly to the masses in the form of this book. Well,
good luck to him.