A Bit of Summer Reading, Perhaps?

Advice from an Almost-Middle-Aged Reader to Some Younger Adults

Watership Down
What if the most timid creatures in the world weren’t really all that timid? What if they took daring risks, told extravagant tales of heroism, and occasionally solved their disputes through vicious warfare? Watership Down doesn’t have much to do with ships going down (although the plot can’t do without one scene involving a small boat), but after this novel you’ll never look at rabbits the same way. Richard Adams’ writing is subtle at first, and he sometimes shows a bizarre enthusiasm for things botanical, but after the first three pages Watership Down has become a real place, and its protagonists have turned from rodents into real people. What a fun, escapist read!

The Hitch-Hiker’s Trilogy
Before he wrote the radio script for this satirical corpus of interstellar lunacy, Douglas Adams contributed a skit to legendary British television/film comedy team Monty Python. After the radio script had caused multiple near-death experiences (some listeners, laughing at the show while they ate, narrowly avoided asphyxiation due to choking) Adams was persuaded by a group of persons with a small suitcase full of cash to turn his script into a novel. The second book in the trilogy, The

Restaurant at the End of the Universe, was elicited from Adams using a somewhat larger suitcase. By the third novel, Life, the Universe, and Everything, they had dispensed with the suitcases and were just bringing over the money in huge bales. Adams’ clever writing is worth every pound of pounds. Although Life, the Universe, and Everything is somewhat less humorous than the preceding two works, it makes up for that by being impossibly weirder. Advice for enjoying it: get on the net and research the sport of cricket.

By the way, the Hitch-Hiker’s trilogy has five novels in it (what, you were expecting different?) – after Life… came So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish, which picks up where Hitch-Hiker’s began. Yes, began. And last but doubtfully least is Mostly Harmless, which is as poly-apocalyptic as the first Hitch-Hiker’s novel most definitely is not – well, okay, it is. A bit. But while Earth is vaporized, neither book’s plot suffers the slightest injury – rather the contrary. Read this series before you turn 21, and savor the experience for life.

Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

You were wondering where that silly “Zen & the Art of” cliche originated? Yep, you guessed it. But it wasn’t notably silly when Robert Pirsig invented the phrase, and he very seriously goes on to forcefully impose responsibility for the world’s being as screwed up as it is on everyone’s favorite (or at least second favorite) ancient Greek philosopher. Which one? Well, if you haven’t read the book, it’s not giving away much of the mystery to note that Pirsig initially throws his lot in with Plato, and it spoils nothing to observe that in the

introduction he admits to not being particularly helpful about either zen or motorcycle maintenance. That turns out to be no major concern, but as the book follows his cross-country motorcycle trip with his son and flashes back with increasing tension on the circumstances leading up to his psychotic break, it becomes clear that Pirsig could really use a greater facility with the one than the other. I’m still not sure if Plato was a zen master, but I’m pretty sure Aristotle wasn’t.

When I read this in college, I just happened to be on essentially the same wavelength as the author – a shade less bonkers, to be sure, but in full agreement with his major points nonetheless. I mean, how dare Aristotle try to write as if he knew everything worth knowing? If you didn’t agree with him on a basic axiom or two, he considered you to have the brains of a plant. Who the hell was this arrogant bastard, anyway?

Turns out he struck Plato as one mighty clever fellow. But he did feel as though he had some ontological turf to defend, as most of us do…so he wrote as if he knew what he was talking about and believed what he was saying. How many of us have done similarly? True, Aristotle thought more deeply than most, and did it in ancient Greek as well, which scores points for style. But I doubt now that he had any inkling what his 600 pound gorilla of an analytical approach would help give rise to – and to be completely fair, if he hadn’t been there to start everyone off wrecking the world, someone else would have stepped into the breach. It’s practically, uh, axiomatic.

And belated kudos to Eric Lyons for complaining so aptly when that professor at St. John’s “put on his big Aristotelian boots and stomped all over” him. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish the teacher from the ruler, but rulers throughout the universe radiate their invisible gratitude whenever someone does.

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