I hate to harsh on Gandhi, but this is just interminable. 200 pages in, and most of it has been details of his dietary regimen. I guess this was all integral to the way he lived and how he managed to have the discipline and strength to do what he did, but it’s not very widely applicable or interesting to read. And he skips right over the very stuff I most wanted to learn about, like the story of the Satyagraha movement in South Africa.

There is good and wise and interesting stuff interspersed, but I’m having a hard time slogging through the minutia to get to it. Of course, he would probably say the minutia is the point and that concentrating on it is the way to live well, but that doesn’t make reading the endless details of his particular case any less mind-numbing. I’ll probably keep going because it’s freaking Gandhi, but I think I would have been better off reading a biography of him by someone else.

I feel that an understanding of Gandhi should be required reading or instruction for every human. That this is in his words makes it worth it to me. I’d like to read a good objective biography as well though.