If I could take only a few books along...
. . . onto a deserted island, I'd include Thoreau's Walden Pond.But I'd request the luxury of taking along the three major annotated editions:
Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer (2004)
Walden: An Annotated Edition, edited by Walter Harding (1995)
The Annotated Walden, edited by Philip Van Doren Stern (1970, 1992)
Corinne H. Smith, a reviewer at Amazon.com, suggests that:
"Lining up the three versions side by side is an interesting experiment, best conducted on a rainy summer day when no other work has appeal."Assuming that my deserted island enjoys rainy summer days -- and thus isn't the desert island usually referred to in a which-books-would-you-take scenario -- then I would do this, too.
Why?
Why, to read in parallel the textual notes, scholarly additions clarifying the obscure and, sometimes, obscuring the clear (thereby necessitating notes to the notes).
Okay, I'm a bit obsessive.
For those of you who share my obsession, check out this annotated Walden from the cyberlibrary of Babel:
Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
Bookmark it for a rainy day.
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 4:35 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
"Walden" has has an almost incalculable effect on me. I discovered it in college, and I've read it four times through. (I'm about due for another.) Walden made me see life, I won't say entirely differently, but in a way that accorded with my true but unarticulated thoughts.
I recall your having mentioned living in a cabin in the woods . . . like Thoreau.
I can't say that Thoreau has affected me that profoundly, but he's had some effect.
I first read Walden in high school, as the urging of my English teacher, then again in university, twice -- once for a professor's class, the other time on my own.
I even read his book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers -- on my own after becoming more interested in Thoreau. Then, I wrote a forgettable term paper on him.
I need to re-read him sometime and publish an article since that has turned to be the best way for me to immerse myself in a writer's thoughts.
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