I really enjoyed this book — its final lines even surpassed The Great Gatsby as my favorite closing lines of a novel. But I couldn’t find myself justifying a rating higher than 4/5 when I broke it down and tried to explain what exactly I enjoyed so much in it. I caught myself after a few minutes, smiled, and realized in some ways that’s what Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was all about.

I’m a very analytical person. I think that isn’t particularly surprising considering I started programming computers way before my brain finished developing. While analytic, dualistic, “dialectical” thinking has benefited me in a lot of ways, I’ve come to realize over the past few years that not everything in life can or should be intellectualized or broken down into repeatable understanding. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance gave some form and vocabulary to a lot of things I’ve been thinking and sometimes writing about over the past few years. I found a lot of resonance in how the book describes how those of us with more analytical tendencies can widen our perspective.

A description of a cross-country motorcycle trip unfolds alongside the narrator’s philosophical musings to the reader, and the two threads intersect and complement each other at various times throughout the book. The “present-day” story starts off slow but picks up as the philosophising half (the “Chautauqua”) starts giving more depth back to the characters in the story-half. At the end of some chapters, I found myself doing something I’ve rarely, if ever, done before: I put the book down just to think through and digest what I’d just read rather than powering full speed ahead to see what happens next.

I can’t remember the last time I wanted to start a book over again as soon as I finished, but I feel like this is a book that would really read differently the second time around with the full context that’s revealed mid-way. I think I’ll just sit for a little longer with that first impression, though.