The Anthropocene Reviewed
Ratings292
Average rating4.4
Is it entertaining? Sure! Is it hilarious? No.
Did I learn anything new? Sure! Is it knowledge I can ever use? No.
It's an OK book. You won't regret reading it, but, really, your time is probably better spent reading something else.
For all you Chernobyl fans out there: 3.6.
It was due at the library and wasn't committed enough to keep reading. I really liked learning about some of the topics though!
"The Anthropocene Reviewed" has a great premise and executes it very well. Each review contained within is endearing and provides insight into the human experience while remaining comedic in a familiar John Green fashion. The depth of the stories John shares are well contrasted with the absurdity of rating each experience on a 5 star scale. Each review is a short and mostly independent story which allows for casual reading. My only complaint is that some stories towards the end felt they had been a bit cut short and I wish there was a little bit more of a "grand finale", but maybe the absence of such a finale is part of it.
I give John Green's "The Anthropocene Reviewed" four and a half stars.
John Green has achieved such a monumental level of celebrity that I was initially unsure if people really enjoyed his work, or if his fans just loved that he put out another thing for them to consume. I have definitely caught a "vlogbrothers" video here and there and I loved "Crash Course World History" when I was in school, but I wanted to read this book without the outside context of John Green as much as I could.
As with many other "collection of essays," I think your connection to the author really drives where or not you find the writing interesting, and I don't think I would have picked it up unless someone who was a fan of John and enjoyed reading the book hadn't recommended it to me.
Ultimately, I think the book is extremely well written and is very captivating. John does a great job of taking some smaller ideas and concepts and adding some of his own personal experiences to make the idea just feel so important. There are a lot of aspects of daily life that just go underappreciated, and it's nice to think about sunsets, Halley's comet, and Diet Dr Pepper sometimes when there is so much else going on. I was also surprised to see that some people dislike the "meandering" that happens in each chapter, but ultimately the meandering is the book. Anyone can read the Wikipedia page about the Lascaux Cave Paintings and get the gist of what they are, but John's writing can help us to understand what the cave means.
I would definitely recommend giving this book a read. The audiobook is also particularly good, John is a great narrator. I am also interested in checking out some of his fiction, although I do worry that I am too far from the intended demographic. We will have to see.
I've been fitting a little of John Green's writing into my brain every day for the past couple of months with this essay collection. It never failed to leave me inspired, laughing, and a little in awe at this planet and the silly humans who inhabit it. I ended my reading with a book covered in highlights and sticky tabs. Green will never fail to impress me with the beautiful way he strings words together.
To fall in love with the world isn't to ignore or overlook suffering, both human and otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June... We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.
I speak only for myself here, but I have a terrible attention span with audiobooks, so I don't consider myself to have “read” this book to fairly review it. I probably missed out on a lot of information. But this felt like an extended John Green Vlog Brothers video, and I enjoyed listening to it on my way to the gym and back.
There was a lot of interesting information. I have similar fears as John, but he is so much more hopeful than I'll ever be.
Finished listening: 20/1/24
I found this book so very compelling and comforting. Though very honest about the intense dread and anxiety that being alive means- I found it to be the most hopeful novel I've read all year.
The Green brothers are some of my favourite parasocial relationships and with John Green, he's the kinda person where I prefer his nonfiction to his ficiton (I have the same relationship with Neil Gaiman). This book was a perfect fit.
I really love the format of connecting a specific human thing, an event or a song, with bigger ideas about life and the general tone of these essays seems to be really calming, zooming out from our little individual experiences into the vastness of general existence.
I give The Anthropocene Reviewed four and a half stars.
Green writes with such humour, intelligence, empathy and perception, I enjoyed every one of these rambling essays. Written during the pandemic, it would be easy to see the worst in the world, but he manages to find a very decent silver lining to most things. 5 stars.
A surprisingly beautiful collection of personal essays. Not every one is a winner, but I'll be coming back to many of these again. Above all, Green has inspired me to find and collect the sparks of radiant light that can help me to keep loving the world in dark times.
Some chapters were so strong they brought me to tears (auld lang syne) and others I could barely get through. Wonderful vacation read though.
“I've been tricking myself, thinking there was some reason for all of it, thinking that consciousness was a miracle when it's really a burden, thinking that to be alive was wondrous when it's really a terror.”
Whether you listen to the podcast or listen to the audiobook, let John Green read his own brain to you. I promise, it will make you feel more than one thing.
When I first picked up this book I struggled to connect and checked the audiobook back into the library. Then I was given the hardcover as a gift. Digesting these bite sized essays in print made me want to go back to the audiobook which is read by the author. The second time around. I loved the audio and will definitely keep the hardcover as a “time capsule” piece in my collection.
I like JG's prose and the topics were varied and enjoyable. I think the Sycamore trees may have been my favorite review. I appreciate the way he weaves his struggles with mental illness through the book; sometimes they're central, even all-encompassing, and sometimes they're absent or just sort of quietly following along. It felt relatable.
(I was originally giving this a 3, but upgraded to 4, because I think it's a 4 for content, 3 for format.)
This is a collection of short essays. I knew that going in, yet I think I still expected some sort of arc, which there was really not. I enjoyed each essay individually but thought reading straight through was a bit of a slog. This would be a great book to keep somewhere you're only going to be able to read an essay or two at a time (bathroom? car?). (Also, every time I write a review I'm a little afraid the author is going to read it and then I'm going to become, say, the person who just recommended their book as a bathroom book to their proverbial face, and that makes me so uncomfortable. My review of reviews: two stars.)
Favorite essays:
Canada Geese
Staphylococcus Aureus
Super Mario Kart
“New Partner”
I've never listened to the podcast, but I thoroughly enjoyed this audiobook. Through a series of seemingly unrelated essay topics, Green tells a story of what it is to be a reflective person living in the Anthropocene – the age of humans. Each essay ends in a rating out of five stars, which is indicative of how we tend view the world around us: how it adds to our singular life, our singular perspective, our singular enjoyment.
As the essays build – and they range from “Air Conditioning” to “CNN” to “The Notes App” to “Sunsets” – we learn about these topics, and the author, and the painful and desperate and hopeful times of the pandemic. The act of reviewing exposes so much of ourselves and our emotional states, and in that way, this is more like a memoir than anything else. Each new chapter beings a new topic and is refreshed with new anecdotes, so it never feels stale. That, and some of the writing is so good, and so relevant and powerful, you'll have to stop to rewind/reread and turn the phrases over a few more times and let them dissolve like a hard candy in your mouth. I learned a lot about a whole variety of random things, but what I really appreciated about this book is that it felt like a warm, friendly hug at the end of a really hard time (the pandemic being the hard time).
If I have any complaints, it's only that some of the chapters were less interesting or vulnerable than others, but writing that out feels like such a minor complaint. This is a pandemic book that gets at the pandemic better than any other book I've read (/listened to), because it's so rich in context that doesn't even read like context until you realize everything is context.
Now I'm waxing. I give this book 4.5 stars.
It is exactly what it says it is, a review of the Human Age or what makes it so and basically a review of humanity. There is the beautiful and there is the horrid but really we need to sit in awe at the evolutionary anomaly that came to give humans consciousness and its rarity in the vastness of the universe. We get to be witnesses to the world and for that i give this book 5 stars.
A cute, hopeful, and interesting collection of random little essays. I lost interest towards the end but I think that just reflects my own reading slump rather than the quality of the book.
Let's just start with this little nugget. “Almost one-third of all residential water use in the U.S.—clean, drinkable water—is dedicated to lawns... Americans use ten times more fertilizer and pesticide per acre of turfgrass than is used in corn or wheat fields ...and grass clippings and other yard waste constitute 12 percent of all the material that ends up in U.S. landfills.” Just wow.
As the dust jacket reminds us, this is after all a collection of essays on our human-centred planet. To that end there are stories about the discovery of the Lascaux cave paintings, the history of Teddy Bears, Piggly Wiggly and Monopoly, examinations on the Yips and the photo Young Farmers from August Sander. As a whole it is entirely enlightening.
But it is also warm and heartfelt and lovingly in awe with world around us. It is the ritual of biking to the Indianapolis 500 with friends, an unabashed love of Diet Dr Pepper, wrestling with anxiety and watching Harvey while dealing with depression that puts author John Green front and centre of these stories. I love his outsized love for his brother, his wife and children, his friends and English football. It's no mean feat to unironically wear your heart on your sleeve and not come of as narcissistic or unbearably saccharine. It helps that he's been living his values out loud online for some time now with VlogBrothers, Crash Course, Project for Awesome and now TikTok. To trust the world, to show it your belly despite the intensely fragile part of you that is terrified of turning itself to the world - that in itself is extraordinary.
The audiobook for this was great. I didn't realize how relatable John Green was until I saw his TikToks and this book is an extension of that relatability. I've struggled with pandemic related media, but this was so well done and integrated into the larger stories that I could actually finish. I loved the concept of rating everyday things. I give this book 4.5 stars