read Thoreau's Walden

Almost done with Chapter 11! There are definitely S L O W parts mixed with quite good parts, as with any book.

On to Chapter 7! I’ve spent two of the last three days reading several things, so I’m pretty excited. I’ve been going through and underlining a lot of stuff. There are many insightful gems in this book. Now I’m thinking that visiting Walden might be a nice adventure…

I’ve finished the quite long first chapter. Once I got going, say, maybe to page 25 or so, it was easy to put down put equally easy to pick back up again. Now that the weather is nice (80 degrees, but rather breezy, making it feel more like 70 degrees), I plan on being outside reading as much as I can during my days off. Onward to the second chapter!

I’ve always wanted to read this book, and I finally picked up a copy while passing through San Antonio with my students last summer.

I started reading in it and underlining** certain passages that caught my eye, but it seems to be the kind of book that I need to devote a lot of time to and not just zip through. (I was an English major. Speed reading is what we do best sometimes, unfortunately!)

So I think that in order to properly read this, I’m going to commit to a chapter a week, maybe two.

• Does anyone else have an intrinsic problem with writing in books/underlining passages that stand out? “THOU SHALT NOT WRITE IN YOUR BOOK” was verbally beaten into us all through school, so when I got to college it was a new and freeing experience to be able to actually write in books without the fear of lightning striking me dead…

It was one of the most important books of my life; I read it when I was 15, and that was the perfect year for me to read it. It’s a book by a young person for young people, and there’s no other book like it.

give in to the call of the wild