Finally!

I just finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I wasn't sure how long it had taken me to read, so I ran a quick search through this blog, and discovered an entry where I had just started reading it.

Dated 11th of June.

Fuck. 18 weeks.

I think that book certainly threw a spanner into my plan to read 50 books this year.

To be fair, just before reading Zen (atAoMM) I had read Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly in less than 48 hours.

What took so long wasn't so much the fact that it is a long book (though at 370 odd pages it's not an afternoon stroll), it's that the concepts underpinning the narrative are so dense and involved.

Of course, it didn't help that 'round about the time that I bought the book, one of my uncles taught me how to do sudoku puzzles, meaning that I had something to do on the tube after I had read the wafer thin freesheets.

Still, in the time it takes to get from Leytonstone to Tottenham Court Road, in any other novel I can usually knock down 10 pages, give or take. In Zen, I'd be lucky to be able to parse 3 or 4.

That said, I do believe it was worth reading.

All the same, I am happy to have a new beginning.

Which book shall I read next?

Over and out.

-J