Siddhartha

Siddhartha 

  - Hermann Hesse

 
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am not into philosophy or self-help genre, hence I have dithered for years whether to read this highly acclaimed book. Well, I eventually read it (digital version, through Kindle Unlimited), but it didn't overwhelm me.

Other than the fact that I don't enjoy reading about other people's philosophy or preachy books, there may be two reasons why I couldn't enjoy it much. First, I can't enjoy on kindle the books that require you to ponder, only physical books work for me for these kind of books. Secondly, there were too many typos and strange sentence structures. I believe the typos resulted from the output of OCR not properly proofread, but not sure whether it is a problem with digital version in general, or only the KU version. As for the sentence structures, I wonder if it was intentional to give an impression of a fable, or shortcoming of translation?.

That said, I did find some interesting lines of thoughts in the book, particularly what I think was the focal point of the book - that knowledge can be taught, but wisdom has to be earned on your own by your contemplation and experiences.