I'd avoided Walden for years. Thoreau's prose has been too flowery for me to be patient with, and his outlook reeked of the intellectual roots of being a hipster. Having finally finished the memoir, I will now concede that he does give an interesting perspective, especially as a person that exists in a future that would probably be a dystopia to good ol' Thor.

There's not much I can add, nor will I contribute to too much more of the ink that's already been spilt over Walden. The fact that he was rejecting modern society in 1847 seems both quaint and prescient at the same time. The hypocrisy of "self-reliance" while his endeavor was being financed by his industrialist friend, as well as relying on domestic labor for his meals. His prose is typical of that of the mid-19th century - at a time when reading was the broadest form of entertainment, authors lay on the metaphor and florid language as if it's going out-of-style. At least Dickens had the excuse of being paid by the word, Thoreau just writes this way because he's suffering from a bout of thesauritus and, I suspect, harboring a superiority complex and a good deal of contempt for hoi polloi that naturally comes with being a Grecian weeb.

But at least it sounds nice being read aloud.