Living the Title: A Life in the Woods
I’m jumping the gun on this one a bit and writing the review before I’ve finished the book, but I need to keep up my momentum of writing the last post. According to my Libby app I have one hour, and forty-eight minutes left in Walden. This is the farthest I’ve ever been in this book, normally I don’t make it out of chapter one, though in my defense chapter one is like thirty percent of the whole thing. Walden has been one of my hardest reads ever, between the flowery language and my general distaste for Thoreau I must physically try to get into it. I’ve owned a hard cover copy for about fifteen years now and have never finished it until now. And I got to admit that that is mainly due to the addition of listening to it on Libby, I can read along at points or go about doing chores and listen. It’s great, I love audio books.
Now let me start by saying I have developed a deep distaste for the author. If Thoreau were alive today, he’d be that Millennial whose parents paid for his college education while he lived in a $50,000 van and produced a podcast about how other Millennials are lazy. In his pontificating voice I heard the ringing of at least two of my bosses from this very year. The whole first half of this book made me want to yeet him straight into Walden pond and be done with it. I literally cannot describe to you how much I hated the first half of this book. Now I know that the time in which Walden was written was drastically different from our current lives, hell I have a woodstove in my shed that’s manufacturing company went bankrupt four years before this book’s publication. But damn! Now everything I hate about the first half is sort of made up for in the second. If the whole book had just been about living slowly and purposefully by Walden pond and learning the history of the area, I would have been so down! There’s so many great take-a-ways from the stories of fishing with neighbors, or the growth of huckleberries. I found his philosophies much more palatable in the context of actual living.
I know Walden is nearing 200 years old and in the context of everything no one really cares what I thought of it, but I’m proud of having pushed myself through it. Especially in this lull in my life where it would be very easy to sit on the couch in my underpants stuffing my face full of junk food. I’m hoping to get back to at least cooking for recipe posts here soon as well, if not as an actual job.