Siddhartha is one of those books I blame entirely on Baby Boomers. I blame them for most things, actually (pollution, the recent recession, suburbanization, etc), but New Age fiction is one of their most egregious contributions to popular culture -- Richard Bachmann and so forth. Siddhartha is the novelization of the life of Buddha, and it is widely lauded for its incredibly spare prose. There is something so frustrating about the conceit; I love spare prose and will give credit where it's due, but I refuse to believe that Siddhartha is the revelation it's held up to be; in its case, the spare prose just feels very derivative of so many religious texts that preceded it, making it clever imitation, not any kind of style ingenuity. Maybe I can enjoy being cynical about it because I was born in the 80s and grew up in an era devoid of the obsession with the East. Of course the 90s had its own post-Hippie phase, but that was more about music and looked to the influence of cultural icons like Jerry Garcia and Janis Joplin, and wasn't nearly as invested in Buddhist philosophy. And as a proud Millenial, in a constant quest for "authenticity," I hate that the book people most closely associate with Eastern philosophy was written by a German and a Christian.

I managed to finish the book because it's of a length and difficulty-level appropriate for an elementary school student (a recurring theme in New Age fiction, no?) but I hated every second of it.

Books I Can't Even (apologies for the use of Internet cliches) is a recurring post on books I absolutely could not finish, usually after several attempts.