emma's Reviews > Siddhartha

there are certain roles i relish in this life.

when i was younger, i loved to play the part of Cool Teenage Girl while babysitting, because it was the most effective and energy efficient way to get children to like me. answering "do you have a boyfriend" and "do you go to parties" 800 times is way easier than running around or doing crafts.

i am still a big fan of embodying Sympathetic Customer at any retail or service establishment i go to. thanks to years of retail/service work this is actually more a truth of myself than a persona, but i amp it up so much that it still applies.

but my ALL TIME FAVORITE character will always be English Student Who Is Devoted Enough And Sufficiently Respected To Get Away With Sh*t Talking The Assigned Reading In Class.

and boy oh boy did i go for the gold on that with this book.

when i was in high school, there was also a cult of white boys who refused to even make eye contact with any girl who wasn't Asian. there were probably six of them floating around the halls, actively fetishizing - seven if you count Hermann Hesse via the copies of Siddhartha that half the junior-year english classes had to read.

this book is just bizarre.

this is part of a series i am doing where i - i've said it before and i'll say it again - claim to be reviewing books i read a long time ago, but more actively reveal unasked for truths about my high school experience.