The Return of the Native

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately," Thoreau writes, "to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Except for a couple of more explicitly religious works, Walden is my favorite book, one I'd want with me on a desert island surrounded by pond water. -Washington Post