This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
In 1845 Henry David Thoreau borrowed an axe, walked a mile and a half from Concord village, and built himself a ten-by-six cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, where he lived alone for two years, two months and two days. Walden is the record of that experiment: what it actually costs to feed and shelter a man, how much of a life is spent paying for things no one needs, and what becomes audible when the noise of ordinary ambition is finally turned off. Thoreau writes as a surveyor, an accountant, a botanist and a moralist at once — measuring the ice on the pond in winter, pricing a house to the shilling, listening to the freight train and the whippoorwill in the same paragraph, and asking, without flinching, why we are so busy living lives of quiet desperation. He is by turns wry, stubborn, ecstatic and cold-eyed, and a century and a half later the questions he put to his neighbours are still the ones worth putting to ourselves. This unabridged reading presents all eighteen chapters, from Economy to Conclusion, narrated by Alex Mercer.