What’s Your Favorite Book? Try ZAMM

It’s summertime and we all know what that means: Do some summer reading! Not sure what distinguishes summer reading from winter, spring, or fall reading (maybe it has something to do with the sort of book you read at the beach, like a lightweight romance), but hey, I thought I’d ask what’s on your reading list this summer. Light or heavy titles are welcome.

Or if you’d like to tell us about your favorite book of all time and why it’s so wonderful to you, do that. Either way, let us hear from you in the Comments section below.

One of my favorite books

Sorry, but I don’t have a favorite book. I have more than one, so let me tell you about the one I’m rereading right now for maybe the fourth time since I first dove into it in 1990 as a student at Rollins College. It’s Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (ZAMM for short). Persig has a whole lot of important things to say about values and quality and what good means. He also says some great stuff about writing, so if you’re a writer, check out the quote at the end of this post.

Back in 1990, I was assigned to read ZAMM for a “Philosophy of Love” class at Rollins my first semester there, but actually, a teacher in Ohio a few years earlier had said I might like it. Boy did she guess right!

The first time I heard about ZAMM

If you’ve read Undertow, you may remember my telling you about going back to college in the fall of 1986 while still working part-time at The Way International. There was a branch campus of The Ohio State University (OSU) in the nearby town of Lima, Ohio, and that’s where I attended classes for a year before we escaped Way headquarters and returned to Florida.

At OSU, for a Basic Writing class, our instructor had us keep journals, which she read and made comments on. We could write about anything we wished. In one of my journal entries, I explored just what quality might mean, contemplating that topic because I’d witnessed such a great lack of it at a certain place I was working. Wink, wink.

During that time, I was in complete and total upheaval, unraveling The Way’s indoctrination—which originated with the founder, Victor Paul Wierwille—and its effects on me. My OSU Basic Writing instructor read my journal entry about quality, and at the top of the page she wrote a note suggesting I might like to read ZAMM. But the title sounded so weird to me that I did not pursue it, didn’t look for it in the library, forgot all about it. Then …

ZAMM caught up to me

Four years later, in September 1990, for that philosophy class at Rollins College in Florida, ZAMM was on the assigned reading list. By this time, I’d earned an Associate of Arts degree at what was then called Valencia Community College in Orlando. I’d done well. My critical thinking skills and my writing skills had improved to the point I was awarded a Merit Scholarship at Rollins my first semester. Intellectually and emotionally, I was ready for this book: I was an English major and working towards a minor in Philosophy, and both of those disciplines are involved in the story of ZAMM.

ZAMM’s author, Robert Persig, uses the story of his long-distance motorcycle trip with his son to tie into a lengthy and enlightening discussion of the notion of Quality. Turns out, Quality isn’t as abstract as we might think. The book gave me insights into how we arrive at seeing what is good (quality), which shored up my gumption to do some hard things to improve my life—such as actually completing my degree in English in 1994. Fortunately, that liberal arts education I earned changed my life for the better in more ways than one!

ZAMM quotes

First, Amazon’s book description:

1. Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.
2. The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.
3. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
4. [When his son asks Persig to help him write a letter to his mom] Persig writes. “… your mind gets stuck when you’re trying to do too many things at once. What you have to do is try not to force words to come. That just gets you more stuck. What you have to do now is separate out the things and do them one at a time. You’re trying to think of what to say and what to say first at the same time and that’s too hard.” (ZAMM, pg. 277).

Thanks for reading!

Your writer on the wing,

Charlene

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