I really liked ZAMM the first few times I read it, when I was very young, and for a while thought it was the greatest book ever. With age and experience comes wisdom, though, and over the years I recognized that there is a lot of pretentious pseudo-scientific crap in there.
The part about "Gumption Traps" is very true and valid, however, and following Pirsig's advice on that front has saved me countless hours of fruitless troubleshooting.
I read this as part of course but it really stuck with me.