This took me like six years (exaggeration) to finish. It was atrociously boring, contradictory, and Thoreau was a snobbish ass. I did read an essay that posited that Walden could be read through the lens of Thoreau being neurodivergent, perhaps autistic, and this did make some of his thoughts about his fellow man make a bit more sense, as well as his desire for seclusion. I'll also, reluctantly, overlook the fact that he spends over 300 pages talking about how self-sufficient he was when his mom was doing his laundry and making him food because he never learned how.

But he is classist at the same time as romanticizing the isolation and scarcity of poverty. He is an intellectual snob at the same time as desiring AND insulting a purely intellectual life. He exoticizes and degrades and dehumanizes indigenous people for being "savages". He contradicts himself, his arguments are hypocritical, rambling bits of nonsense that were only palatable because I read them as satire.

He gets two stars because the later parts of the book, where he's mostly just describing his surroundings, are pretty. But this was a slog to get through that I wouldn't have read at all had it not been a gift ten years ago that I've still not felt okay getting rid of.