Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854)

Twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents: that is what it cost Henry David Thoreau to build a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond, and he gives you the figure down to the half-penny, board by board, because the whole book turns on a single audacious sum. The price of anything, he insists, is the amount of life you exchange for it, and most of us, he means you, have overpaid for things we never wanted. So he went to the pond to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts and see what they had to teach. What follows is two years compressed into one turning year, ice thickening and thawing on the pond, rows of beans hoed clean, the dawn arriving as if for the first time. The prose measures everything and worships everything at once. Close it and the question stays lodged: what is your own life costing you, and did you ever agree to the price?