One of the perils of reading books to your kids in an effort to mold their tastes is that while they might not take to the reading, you're going to get sucked in and re-read the book. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was something I started reading to Boen in an effort to get him to stop reading easier books. I got him a couple of chapters into it and to my surprise it was surprisingly easy reading --- the thing about having done many bicycle tours by this point in his life, the touring aspects of the book were completely comprehensible and enjoyable for Boen.
I enjoyed the book on this reading, even getting into the section on the various philosophers that I'd always tried to zip through as fast as I could. What's interesting for me on this reading was the considerable emphasis on academic life. At no point do we get any motivation from Pirsig's narrator as to why he spent all that time teaching. It's quite clear that after his nervous breakdown he was capable of holding on to other jobs like technical writing.
Another aspect of the book that comes to mind was how uninterested Pirsig's narrator was in systemic answers. At the time of publication the United States was comparatively wealthy compared to the rest of the world, and hence the narrator had the luxury of assuming that physical well being could be taken for granted. In the current political environment that's not quite possible, and the book provides no solutions and even seems to try to move away from seeking such solutions.
To the extent that craftsmanship has become devalued in modern society in favor of an ever bigger emphasis on the use of AI to achieve goals with minimum effort, it's quite clear that the book failed to influence society in a better direction. I suppose it's too much to expect a book, any book to influence society to any such extent. One can only fantasize about a society that takes the tenets described by the book to a greater extent.
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