Walden

In 1845 Thoreau built a cabin on land owned by his friend Emerson beside Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, and lived there for two years, two months and two days. Walden folds that stay into the cycle of a single year, from building the house to the thawing of the pond in spring. Thoreau counts his costs to the cent, mocks his neighbours' hurried lives, and describes his bean field, the winter ice, a war between ants, a loon on the water and the whistle of the passing train, arguing all the while that a person can live deliberately on very little.

Published in 1854, Walden became a founding book of American nature writing and of the idea of simple living, and the essay on civil disobedience Thoreau wrote in the same years travelled as far as Tolstoy and Gandhi. Gord Mackenzie's unhurried solo reading lasts a little over fourteen hours.