Siddhartha

⚖The case for it

The second half is where readers stay: Siddhartha settles at a river crossing and learns from a ferryman mostly by being listened to. The book covers asceticism, wealth, fatherhood and old age inside a couple of hours’ reading without any of it feeling summarised. The prose is flat and parable-plain on purpose, and readers say “it felt like an old tale of ancient knowledge.” The hinge is his refusal to become anybody’s disciple, even Gautama’s, on the grounds that wisdom can be lived into and never talked into you. “No shortcuts. Just a man who had to experience everything.” A century of self-help reads after it as “a watered-down version of what this German guy figured out.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Siddhartha “mocks and berates everyone else” and nobody in the book lands a real counter-argument, because it is “so much in love with its main character.” Consequences slide off him, and one reader notes he “doesn’t learn a whole lot after a whole lifetime.” The Buddhism is “Buddhism with a small b” by a sympathetic critic’s account, closer to German self-reliance in an Indian setting, and the book rejects teachers wholesale while being built entirely out of aphorisms. Kamala exists to move his plot and gets “fridged for the sake of the plot.” Adults rereading a school assignment find the same lines “pompous and conceited.”

— the honest librarian

3h

honest hours

4

sittings