Thoreau comes across as a smug, privileged, self-righteous asshole. He lectures the reader and criticizes society at-large, especially in the introduction and conclusion. Thoreau feels people are too captivated by material possessions and live overly complicated lives because of this. I toiled for 15+ days on this mid-sized book. His obnoxiously long run-on sentences—with phrase after phrase offset by commas—were challenging. By the time I got through one of these run-ons my mind had wandered or I lost the thread. Mix in some 1800’s lexicon and I spent a lot of time re-reading passages. I was expecting a book about solitude and what it felt like to experience such solitude. That’s not what Thoreau delivered—for several reasons. First, his intention wasn’t solitude as much as simple living. Second, he made frequent trips to his nearby village and hosted lots of visitors and passersby. Solitude was just a byproduct of his locale. Third, what solitude he did experience wasn’t communicated. His default was to describe at length the minutiae of his environment and nature, but rarely to share the felt experience. What did it feel like to wake up with no agenda? What did it feel like to ride out a snowstorm in a remote setting? What surprised you? What did you find yourself thinking about? Instead, we got page after page describing the melting and cracking of pond ice. While he boasts about shunning participation in the everyday economy, he has no problem popping into town for a meal, to sell his crops or take advantage of other services that are made possible because of that economy. So the whole experiment felt performative. A poser, a weirdo and maybe the 19th century equivalent of an influencer that just needed to generate content so he had something to write about.