A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
by Henry David Thoreau · first published 1849
7mentions
3recommended by
6HN commenters
2010–2024first – last mentioned
50% recommend50% neutral
Thoreau's first book excels at depicting nature around his trip in words.
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…years, I read all of Dickinson (what a genius), and then all of Emerson's published writing. And, then picked up Thoreau last year. And I haven't been able to put him aside. Walden, all his essays, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, his Cape Cod and Maine travelogues, now deep into his journals and letters. Thoreau -- Henry! -- is like this amazing friend. I can hardly imagine anyone who has dismissed him has spent any serious time…
on “Reading Thoreau at 200” ↗The sequel, Lila, is also really great. He's worked out the structure of Quality, in detail, and it makes a lot of sense. p.s. If you love Pirsig, read Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) - the form is identical.
on “Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?” ↗I think "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" is both charming and funny. The book is a view into the very early industrialization of the United States, as framed by two brothers taking a boat trip. I also recommend "Civil Disobedience", an essay…
on “Thoreau Was Actually Funny” ↗Thoreau on Goethe (_A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_, Thursday): "He was even too _well-bred_ to be thoroughly bred. He says that he had had no intercourse with the lowest class of his towns-boys. The child should have the advantage of ignorance as well…
on “Slow, free range, idle parents can increase IQ and happiness” ↗…social, societal systems humans are a part of, anthropology/anthropologists trying to study them, and how those systems work, how each has its own Quality.. (long story!) A few years ago I read Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and was immediately struck by, well, the form is exactly the same as Pirsig's books - nature/observation writing interspersed with slabs of philosophical/theoretical. Lila is even mostly set on…
on “Robert Pirsig on The Scientific Method (1974) [pdf]” ↗…Edward Dahberg, the first run of Thus Spake Zarathusra sold ten copies, the first run of Stendhal's On Love, seventeen copies. That considered, Thoreau selling just more than 200 of the first printing of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers appears as a raging success--but he had many literate friends. Simon Leys, in the essay "Readers' Rewards and Writers' Rewards", quotes the French writer, and sometime publisher, Jacques Chardonne as…
on “No one buys books” ↗…magazine salesman, took on other teaching and tutoring gigs, and even spent a brief stint shoveling manure before finding some success with his true passion: writing. Henry published his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, when he was 31 years old, after 12 years of changing jobs and bouncing back and forth between his parents’ home, living on his own, and crashing with a buddy, who believed in his potential. “[He] is…
on “The Cognitive Upside to an Extended Adolescence” ↗