Walden: Volume 1

I should have read Walden when I was in high school & the sense of living away from everyone with only the barest of necessities was truly romantic.If I had, maybe I would have found him to be captivating & mysterious & inspiational, like Chris McCandless, the tragic youth who perished in Alaska's wilderness & wrote in his notebook how he was inspired by Walden. He found Thoreau a truly heroic character whom he planned to emulate.But I read him now, long removed from my youth & evidently too sufficiently jaded to see the romance I probably would have embraced what seems like a lifetime ago. Perhaps I was disappointed in myself for not grasping whatever essential lessons of solitude or descriptive discourse should have been distilled from digesting such a slim volume of work. For whatever reason it failed to move me like I thought it would. I'll have to read it again, some other time, when I'm older, less encumbered by my attachments to fantasies from my past.

This book has been the most influential life changing book of my life. Not only is it inspirational but it makes one believe in actually living again. It rejuvenates the soul and brings hope to the heart.

Read this in hardcover but felt compelled to write a review on here as well. This is considered widely as the go-to book on simple living, and for good reason. Thoreau, though sometimes coming off as arrogant, makes many intelligent and thought-provoking observations about the world which hold up even to this day, some even more so than 150 years ago when the book was written. If you can get past the verbose style of writing he used (and this is no easy task, we speak much differently now than our ancestors), you will enjoy this book immensely. Recommend to anyone who has had enough of the materialistic mindset of the modern world, or anyone who just wants to sit down and think.