This is one book that you should consider as a primer for thinking. And I do not mean thinking in the day-to-day sense. This thinking relates more to Analysis. Using Bike maintenance as an underlying motif, this book actually talks about thought patterns people follow. Bike maintenance is used as a metaphor to clarify some very abstract philosophical concepts in this book. These concepts relate to Meta thought- or an over view of the thinking process.
The later part of the book gets very heavy on the philosophical issues related. For me, one major help in understanding this book was to constantly consider how my thought process goes in analyzing a problem (it could be a curriculum problem, or how to get from place A to place B.) this gives very good insights into your own approach to solving problem.
When the author talks about some people looking at technology as something incomprehensible, he is actually talking about a thought process that looks at anything as a whole, and does not try to break down the problem into smaller bits. This is the Romantic view. The Analytical view breaks a problem into smaller parts, in an attempt to solve it.
Going deeper into the philosophical subtleties, the book refers to Quality, and tries to explain/analyze why Quality is such an illusive aspect in our day to day life- we all know a high quality thing, but defining it is such a big problem.
After a lot of philosophical convolutions, the author presents Quality as a point of initial perception. This was the part I found too esoteric, and was totally unable to relate to. But then, I believe that if a new idea escapes you, maybe you are not yet ready to accept it, or understand.
Overall, it is a tough book to read- I myself sometimes read just 2-3 pages a day- but if you look at this book as a guide about how you should think, how you should approach problems, then you can accept parts of it, and wait for others to become clearer over time. One learning is that you should be aware that the things are the way they seem as much due to you own thought and perception, as much as due to their own process.
Let me know what you think.