The Anthropocene Reviewed
Reviews
I give this book 5 stars
This is maybe my new favorite John Green book, I thought about it constantly even when I wasn't reading it. I'm a sucker for learning interesting new facts.
My top 3 favorite reviews in the book were:
- Piggly Wiggly
- The Indianapolis 500
- Lascaux Cave Paintings
Feels meta to review this book with a 5-star rating system, lol
I loved this book from cover to cover. It made me cry more than once. reading this as it feels the world is falling apart made me feel a little better. Or a little less alone in the despair. Can’t wait to pass this book around 🥹
This is perfect. I loved it! Five stars!
John Green made me cry about birds
A bunch of my friends have read this book and I love to read recommendations from friends so I picked this one up. I'll admit, I did not get the hype at first. Sometimes reading nonfiction during the semester just feels like work for me. I can't sit down and properly enjoy it because I've got three thirty page readings to get through that week. But then I was granted access to the audiobook (shoutout Kelsey) and that made it so much better. Listening to John Green just talk to me in the same way I like to talk to my friends sometimes was awesome and I found myself feeling like I was just hanging out with a friend and having the kind of simultaneously goofy but intellectually stimulating conversations that the best friendships produce. The real turning point for me was the double whammy of "Auld Lang Syne" and "Googling Strangers"; those two just absolutely gutted me. Overall, a great read. I think for some of it I just wasn't feeling it because of the whole school thing so this may be one I revisit in the future and bump to five stars. But for now, for its refreshing, poignant, and complex commentary, I give The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, four stars.
Highlights
He showed me that you could still be crazy and still be human, still be valuable, and still be loved.
nobody ever brings anything small into a bar.
"You are of my flesh but you are not mine own. Fate is your father and you belong to the people, for you shall lead the army of the free."
"When we are young, we drink our coffee with milk and sugar. And as we age, we drink it with milk only, then we drink it black, then we drink it decaf, then we die. Our next eater is at decaf."
Basically, Saunders spoke of Piggly Wiggly as today's Silicon Valley executives talk of their companies: We're not just making money here. We are replenishing the earth.
can't see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy
I wonder if you have people like that in your life, people whose love keeps you going even though they are distant now because of time and geography and everything else that comes between
"When one of us says, 'Look, there's nothing out there,' what we are really saying is, 'I cannot see.'"
"What's 'ostentatious' mean?" And I told him it meant, like, "showy" or "over the top". Todd nodded subtly to himself and then, after a second, said, "Cool. I got them all then." And he had. Perfect score on the SAT.
my way of being, so profoundly shaped by machine logic?
'The world is too much with us; late and soon.'
analyzing the temperature preferences of forty-year old, 154-pound men wearing business suits
home is "not a place, but a moment."
I love dogged pursuits, and dogged efforts, and dogged determination.
We're the only species that knows it has a temporal range.
But if no one is around to play Billie Holiday records, those songs really won't make a sound anymore.
It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June.
PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO.
She explained that when people write reviews, they are really writing a kind of memoir
In the years since I'd been a book reviewer, everyone had become a reviewer, and everything had become a subject for reviews.
The five-star scale doesn't really exist for humans; it exists for data aggregation systems, which is why it did not become standard until the internet era.
“Nothing lies like memory.”
“ The past is neither fixed nor fixable.”
“ History, like human life, is it once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.”