Seven complaints, in the order they bothered me, followed by a verdict that contradicts all seven. I have argued myself round twice on this and I am standing by both halves.

1. It repeats itself. He comes back to the shortness of life eleven times by my count, twice in Book Two alone, and by the third occurrence I could see the sentence arriving before it got there.
2. Nothing is built on anything else. You can open it at any page, which is convenient, and it also means the thing never accumulates into an argument.
3. The context is missing and the book cannot supply it. A man with absolute power writing about accepting what he can't change is doing something different from a farmer writing the identical line — and nothing in the text acknowledges the difference.
4. My translation smooths him. I bought a second one to compare and the older version is stiffer, stranger and, I think, more honest about how odd he actually sounds.
5. He is unkind about the body. Wine is fermented grapes, meat is a dead animal, and so on. As a technique for cooling desire it works; by Book Six it had curdled into something joyless.
6. Other people appear almost entirely as an occasion for his own patience. He wants to tolerate the difficult colleague. He shows no sign of wanting to know him.
7. The introduction in my edition runs longer than Book One and tells you what to think before you've had a chance to think it. I read introductions last now, and this is the book that taught me to.

I gave it a ten anyway. Every complaint above is accurate and I still read a page of it most mornings before work, and the mornings I skip are noticeably worse.