If I had to pick one book to list as my favourite of all time, it would be Robert Pirsig's Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Published 1974, but I didn't pick it up until 1994 when I was about 17. My reading at that time consisted of Douglas Adams, Stephen King and various pop psychology and self-help titles. I was also trying to follow Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan books. Basically I was raiding my mums bookshelf.
I'm still not sure, to this day, what hooked me, as the fictionalised backdrop that the book leads with was based in a very different world from mine. I think it must have been the introduction, early on, of the concepts of romantic vs classical understanding. Or underlying form vs superficial aesthetic. I had always been torn between my artistic interests and my technical ones, and here was a book attempting to unify the two outlooks, for a reason that wasn't completely clear at the outset. It was like the two halves of my mind were both enjoying the same book for the first time ever.
I was also at that age where I was looking for meaning in the world, and I had just dropped out of college, and this book had a great deal to say about both.
Then there was the mental illness. Not explicitly stated at the beginning, but alluded to, that the narrator had gone down some kind of conceptual rabbit hole searching for answers to something and it had literally driven him insane.
It was also the first time I was introduced to the work of several philosophers, as well as the Tao te Ching, in a torrent of ideas that included mathematics, engineering, writing and learning, all connected to a central concept. One word: Quality.
I don't think it's a coincidence that three years later, George Lucas told such a popular story that revolved around a single force that unites the universe. If he'd read it, and selling 5 million copies initially, there's a good chance he did, then he'd have been profoundly influenced by this book.
His ideas about education alone are sublime, when he discusses the effects of withholding grades, and the different types of student, based on motivation for learning. It really helped me deal with my own academic shortcomings and put them into a meaningful perspective.
This passage has always stayed with me, and is the reason I hardly ever suffer from writers block:
He'd been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn't. They just couldn't think of anything to say. One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five hundred word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman. When the paper came due she didn't have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn't think of anything to say. He had already discussed her with her previous instructors and they'd confirmed his impressions of her. She was very serious, disciplined and hardworking, but extremely dull. Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere. Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, were the eyes of a drudge. She wasn't bluffing him, she really couldn't think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told.
It just stumped him. Now he couldn't think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: "Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.'' It was a stroke of insight.
She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn't think of anything to say, and couldn't understand why, if she couldn't think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street. He was furious. "You're not looking!'' he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn't looking and yet somehow didn't understand this. He told her angrily, "Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.''
Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. "I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,'' she said, "and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don't understand it.''
Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn't think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn't recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.
Genius!