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I never have understood why this dense book is assigned for schoolkids to read. Yes, it is unprecedented in American literature, a great book--without being particularly "good reading." It's formidable, and I have never gotten through it, chapter after chapter. I find it a great dippers' book, and maybe those who assign it are exactly that, dippers. Several of Thoreau's other works are more engaging and accessible, from the Maine Woods (perhaps my favorite) to Cape Cod, even A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and especially, Selections from the Journals (see my GRds rev). The Maine Woods has its challenges, too--for example, Thoreau's fascination with, and dictionary of, native Indian language (Abnaki, not Pasamoquoddy). Also, as ever in Thoreau, botanical classifications in Latin--his Harvard education actually benefitted him as Bill Gates' arguably did not, except for affiliations (no reason to go to school, yet the prime reason in 21st C for most status schools like Harvard Biz).
HDT's Cape Cod varies tremendously, including journalistic reporting of a terrible shipwreck on the South shore of Massachusetts (not unlike the one that killed Margaret Fuller returning from Garibaldi's Italian revolution and losing her MS on that seminal event). But also, perhaps Thoreau's funniest story ever, the Wellfleet Oysterman chapter. Hilarious.
Thoreau often writes with humor in his Journals, too, especially when his publisher sends him the remaindered 706 copies (out of the edition of 1000) of his A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River: "I now have a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." His story of chasing the pig is a classic, very different from my own family story. My grandfather had a pig, Delfiney, who had the run of the little house-backhouse and barn, but escaped anyway one day. Gramp enlisted his ony neighbor within a mile, who reluctantly agreed to the futile task. When they got about three quarters of a mile, they sighted the pig and Gramp called, "DelFINEY!!" The pig came running to him.
Thoreau reaches down into a bullhead nest to discover their pattern of habitation. Here's part of his long encounter with a Woodchuck.After a long run, he exhausts the creature: "I sat down by his side within a foot. I talked to him quasi forest lingo, baby-talk, at any rate in a conciliatroy tone, and throughout that I had some influence on him. He gritted his teeth less. I chewed checkerberry leaves and presented them to his nose at last without a grit, though I saw that by so much gritting of the teeth he had worn them rapidly and they were covered with a fine white powder, which, if you measured it thus, would have made his anger terrible." These journals prove HDT a worldclass botanist and taxonomist; in fact, he died a martyr to science, counting tree rings (see T Baird's "Corn Grows in the Night" in the Norton Walden.)
Ironically, Walden is not Thoreau's best book, but it is the only one most students ever encounter.
It vocalizes the aspirations of a young college grad to higher thoughts--and such thoughts permeated the literature of the Nineteenth Century, especially in America.