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carollynnrivera 's review for:
Walden
by Henry David Thoreau
I've never been so glad to finish a book in my life. I’ve read books that I don't like before, but at least there was always something mildly redeeming about them. Maybe I loved to hate them or there were interesting tidbits in the midst of the drudgery. This book was just penance. I really think that most people who love this book either haven't read it and just love the idea of it (me, before I read it) or love it for pretentious reasons of self-importance and not wanting to sound bourgeoise for disagreeing with the general ecstasy. I mean, if you truly loved this book, great. But you can't convince me it's not terrible.
As nature writing it's about as boring as reading a random word generator and also about as senseless. If you want to know the precise size of the bubbles in the ice down to the millimeter, and how long across the pond is, and how many squirrels live under the house, you will get your wish. If you want spring compared to lungs and intestines and other sensory-assaulting metaphors then you will get your wish.
If you want something poetic and inspiring forget it. At best he will describe the details of his surroundings in tedious and mind-numbing detail.
As a treatise for “simple living” you really have to be kidding. Two years of choosing to live in a shack while still going into town to talk, live and eat is not exactly subsistence living. So he experimented with growing beans and refusing to use a door mat (which, incidentally, is apparently a path to evil). That hardly makes him a minimalist or even someone who is conducting a reasonable experiment in living “off the grid”.
His “morals” and “higher truths” are a sort of strict Protestant ethic devoid of religion. Eating meat is bad. Being ignorant of literature and art is bad. Being lazy is bad. Interestingly enough, working is also bad (because it leads to the pursuit of “stuff”) and so is education (why waste time in school when you could be outside?) I guess you're supposed to magically be a philosophical genius without ever learning a single thing, and you'd surely better figure out the right way to work without working.
He complains about farmers who use tools, he complains about his stupid neighbors and their ugly baby, he complains about music, he complains about window curtains. It's ridiculous, condescending and profoundly contradictory in its proselytizing.
Even the idea of self-reliance is laughable. He stayed in a cabin given to him by Emerson for his experiment and then berated everyone else for failing to live off the fruits of their own labors. His take on being poor is that people are poor because they choose to be, which he says with all requisite condescension, and which is quite amusing given how opposed he is to human labor and progress. He fails so fundamentally to grasp any hint of human interdependence yet has a preponderance of opinions about how everyone “should” live their lives.
It's really nice that he was anti-slavery and took a stand by refusing to pay taxes he disagreed with (sovereign citizen, anyone?) but his overall compassion for and interest in other human beings besides himself is wholly absent.
If you want to cherry pick a couple of interesting sentences and make them mean what you want them to mean, then that's great. But as a whole his writing is dull, ponderous, derogatory, self-important and unbearable.
Sorry, literature, I just couldn't see past this to find anything redeeming about this book at all.
As nature writing it's about as boring as reading a random word generator and also about as senseless. If you want to know the precise size of the bubbles in the ice down to the millimeter, and how long across the pond is, and how many squirrels live under the house, you will get your wish. If you want spring compared to lungs and intestines and other sensory-assaulting metaphors then you will get your wish.
If you want something poetic and inspiring forget it. At best he will describe the details of his surroundings in tedious and mind-numbing detail.
As a treatise for “simple living” you really have to be kidding. Two years of choosing to live in a shack while still going into town to talk, live and eat is not exactly subsistence living. So he experimented with growing beans and refusing to use a door mat (which, incidentally, is apparently a path to evil). That hardly makes him a minimalist or even someone who is conducting a reasonable experiment in living “off the grid”.
His “morals” and “higher truths” are a sort of strict Protestant ethic devoid of religion. Eating meat is bad. Being ignorant of literature and art is bad. Being lazy is bad. Interestingly enough, working is also bad (because it leads to the pursuit of “stuff”) and so is education (why waste time in school when you could be outside?) I guess you're supposed to magically be a philosophical genius without ever learning a single thing, and you'd surely better figure out the right way to work without working.
He complains about farmers who use tools, he complains about his stupid neighbors and their ugly baby, he complains about music, he complains about window curtains. It's ridiculous, condescending and profoundly contradictory in its proselytizing.
Even the idea of self-reliance is laughable. He stayed in a cabin given to him by Emerson for his experiment and then berated everyone else for failing to live off the fruits of their own labors. His take on being poor is that people are poor because they choose to be, which he says with all requisite condescension, and which is quite amusing given how opposed he is to human labor and progress. He fails so fundamentally to grasp any hint of human interdependence yet has a preponderance of opinions about how everyone “should” live their lives.
It's really nice that he was anti-slavery and took a stand by refusing to pay taxes he disagreed with (sovereign citizen, anyone?) but his overall compassion for and interest in other human beings besides himself is wholly absent.
If you want to cherry pick a couple of interesting sentences and make them mean what you want them to mean, then that's great. But as a whole his writing is dull, ponderous, derogatory, self-important and unbearable.
Sorry, literature, I just couldn't see past this to find anything redeeming about this book at all.