Abhorred the excerpts of this in high school literature and thought ten years of life experience might warm me up to it. Nearly DNF’ed a few times this month, and I do have a more favorable view than I did in high school — some gems of wisdom in here — but it is desperately in need of an abridged version.

My senior year of high school, I took an elective unit of American lit, which was taught by a teacher who was really burned out and had no business still being in a classroom. After a couple of weeks of wrangling the class lunkheads, who were only interested in screwing around, one day she simply passed out a stack of "find-a-word" puzzles and stopped teaching entirely. For the rest of the term I spent my time either in the library or actually reading the textbook, which is where I first encountered "Walden." It was love at first read. I have a copy of "The Annotated Walden" that I got in the late '70s/early '80s, which was immensely helpful in understanding some of the more obscure references.

Come to think of it, I need to re-read Walden. And probably Emerson's essays, too. They were both books that moved the 17-year-old me beyond description.

At the beginning there were little nuggets of philosophy that I enjoyed but as the book went on it got more and more difficult to pick up and keep going because it is extremely boring with its overabundance of detail and lack of story.

It’s long and it’s dense and there are way too many filler episodes but the good stuff is beyond good. I was struck with such an inspiration to live in communion with nature, with less. and the ending is definitely the best part

A borefest with some brilliant snippets here and there. Review will follow when I've recovered.

the self made man is a myth

Re-reading Walden, because sometimes you just need to.

I read this book when I was a romantically inclined high school student. I loved it. As I got older and learned that Thoreau actually didn't spend all of his time with his toes grazing the waters of Walden Pond--that he went into town on a regular basis to be with Dad, some of ths shine came off the apple for me. Sure it's still a masterpiece, and the writing is gorgeous, but I couldn't help but picture a kid pretending to live in a treehouse but coming home to mom's tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches when it was lunchtime.

1.5/5

Like the idea of reading Walden, better than H.D. himself