The Anthropocene Reviewed (Signed Edition) Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
Reviews
John Green’s reflections didn’t offer much new for me—just a collection of familiar, liberal-leaning observations that felt more like an echo chamber than fresh insight. While some essays introduced interesting tidbits, most were fairly run-of-the-mill. I expected something deeper but ended up with a nicely packaged version of ideas I already embraced, like “optimistic nihilism.” That said, this book might resonate more with readers new to that perspective. Rating a book of reviews feels a little too on-the-nose, but here we are—2.5 stars.
First, I feel like such an intellectual knowing the meaning of the Anthropocene.
This was one of the most enjoyable books in my reading history with really valuable insights from John Green. Reviewing and rating random topics? Yes, I am game. There’s so much in life and in our surroundings to look deeper into it and find meaning, and this book inspired me to do that.
Reading this book felt like a self-preventative measure against nihilism, despair, and existential dread. John Green brings a glimmer of hope through these essays without glorifying or sounding too optimistic about humankind. I enjoyed his reflections on the pandemic. As per John Green fashion, there are many unique stories embedded with historical context and random trivia which offers readers an interesting point of view. I give John Green’s ability to transcend my capacity to hope and wonder five stars.
Hate to be corny … but I give it 5 stars.
“I will, sooner or later, be the everything that is part of everything else. but until then: what an astonishment to breathe on this breathing planet. what a blessing to be earth loving earth.” all i can say: what a joy to have read this book and to see the world through another living, loving, breathing human’s eyes, i give this 6 out of 5 stars
I don’t usually write reviews, but since this book is essentially about reviews, I’ll try. The only John Green novel I’ve read is The Fault in Our Stars. I’ve seen John and Hank Green roam around the Internet for awhile and I’ve always thought that I can relate more to Hank, given his science background. But reading this, I think I can enjoy the content from this two brothers equally. This book started out as a podcast with the same title— I was recommended the podcast by my friend, but given my poor listening skill, a book is better for me, so I was grateful for John Green for turning his podcast into a book. The Introduction did a superb job of, well, introducing the book. John started out with a quote from Allegra Goodman, who, when asked “whom would you like to write your life story” answered “I seem to be writing it myself. But since I’m a novelist, it’s all in code.” John then wrote that he felt distant from discussing his novels and decided that he doesn’t want to write in code anymore. I think this sums up this book nicely: this book is essentially John Green’s life story, summed up in his reviews about the Anthropocene: a tern for the current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In the Introduction, John also talked about how his initial Reviews were completely devoid of himself and only when he puts himself in his reviews were he able to truly pay attention. The main thing I love about this book is how John puts himself inside the reviews, and by doing so, he’s putting the human species inside of his reviews. It is bu no means a human-centered reviews of the human-centered planet. I seem to relate and appreciate a lot of touches that John puts in this book, and the overall writing style of John. My favorite reviews were the first halves of the 44 reviews contained in this book. If I had to choose, my favorite would be Academic Decathlon, Sunsets, Harvey, and Sycamore Trees. This book is not only informational but emotional to a level— you get to learn on how the author lives his life through a series of seemingly unrelated stories about stuff. Overall, I give The Anthropocene Reviewed five stars.
Breath of fresh air!!
An ode to the age of the anthroposcene, Green does not shy away from the ugly, the embarrassing, and the emotional. Funny, frank, and with more than a sprinkle of self deprecating humour (but also coping and overcoming!). Made the mistake of listening to the chapter on googling people in public, big mistake.
wow
i give john greens ability to make me see the world with new eyes 5 stars
Listened on audio and really loved this! Learnt some fun facts, was genuinely touched multiple times, and the quirky earnestness still works in essays in a way it doesn't for me in his fiction anymore
"I don't believe we have a choice when it comes to whether we endow the world with meaning. We are all little fairies, sprinkling meaning dust everywhere we go." John Green has this uncanny ability to directly pierce my heart and this novel is no different. It's really quite simple: I just love him. I love everything he does; his words and thoughts always feel so striking to me and I just...adore him. I hold both him and Hank Green in very high esteem. As a long time fan of the podcast under the same name, I knew I'd enjoy this novel which is basically just a collection of John's reviews of things that exist in this world, both physical and abstract. He reviews actual objects while also reviewing the IDEA of things; some far-fetched and some ordinary. I loved learning how he felt about sunsets while also learning about cholera in the same book. The bite-sized formula of this book was so fun. This was my subway book the past couple weeks. I'd keep it in my backpack and read it on those long subway rides that music simply can't soothe. It was easy to pick up and put down. It held just the right amount of my attention. I loved his use of quotes and how he made everything feel so deeply personal. I can't wait to read this again in the future with a highlighter. I also can't wait to eat a hot dog in Iceland. A must read for John Green fans. A true delight.
WOW.
🤝
Of the books I have read, I count two books as actually life changing. The first is Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson, the second is this book. I believe this is to be a heartfelt, genuine, and honest dive into the human experience. I love this book and think that everyone should read this.
Wow i love this book so much I felt so moved and so heard and so amazed i learnt and felt so much John Green I’ll probably never read any of your fiction novels but this one (which is non-fiction) was truly a delight to read and the only book of yours, where when people bring you up at this point of my life, i can say i have read from start to finish and enjoyed hehe
part of me wanted to leave this review without a starred rating, but oh my days this is one of my favorite reads. i loved every chapter. john green, you talk good. i give the anthropocene reviewed five stars.
I love random facts and finding morality in authors. words <3
i did not finish this book yet but i am on the last few pages and i thought i’d write down my thoughts while i have them. i’m obsessed with john green’s writing and how he connects different concepts to each other, especially small miscellaneous things to giant ideas about humanity. how i wish to write tbh! i remember tearing up at the end of the last essay, and the book as a whole was very very beautiful. tfios left me with a fear of death but this book left me with 1. an appreciation for just how much of the world there is and 2. why do people find being small/insignificant comforting??? that’s all! i really enjoyed this book, didn’t majorly blow my mind but is a wonderful read. perhaps if i read this in a few more years where i’m older and further from the actual events in the book i will see it differently! rn it’s like. almost like what encyclopedias felt like to 8 year old me. edit: i understand now! my understanding is being small/insignificant = nothing (including my actions) matter which can be rly comforting when you screw up
Picked it up from a Goodreads recommendation. The author goes through totally random memories of different things and rates them on a scale of 5. A rather entertaining read (listen) which I quite enjoyed. Author did a great job being funny and informative.
Note: Rounded up to five stars because John literally reviewed the font in the copyright section in his own book. “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.” Short chapters/essays, but very entertaining, educational, and thought-provoking, The essay topics range broadly all the way from Air Conditioning to Sunsets, and even The Penguins of Madagascar. John ties the history of the topics with his own personal experience and connections to show an appreciation for the mundane world around us. Very vulnerable and human. I give The Anthropocene Reviewed four and a half stars.
A book I truly admired. I believe I may admire more than most because I could see that as an author this was his prized piece of writing that meant the most to him and therefore meant even more to me. I understood him. I’ve always wanted to write something like this. It’s all about him. So only read it with expectations to find more out about Green himself
"And yes, how grateful we are to the modernists for knocking down our doors to inform us that clouds do not threaten or weep, that the only verb a cloud ever verbed was to be. But we give a soft white damn whom snow touches. [...] We will build meaning wherever we go, with whatever we come across. But to me, while making meaning isn't a choice, the kind of meaning can be." I'll preface this review by saying that I give John Green five stars. I will read anything this man writes and his way of thinking (another reviewer called it 'optimistic nihilism' -- I think it is somewhat well-encapsulated by the quote above) has permanently shaped my own. While ultimately still an enjoyable and recommendable reading experience filled with interesting trivia about the world humans have created and great insight into John Green's mind, The Anthropocene Reviewed was not quite what I expected/hoped in a few respects. 1. Admittedly, I did not realize this was a memoir/autobiography (my thought process was just: 'new John Green book! anthropocene?!?! add to cart'). This was not necessarily an issue, but I found that the parts of this book that were most compelling for me were less personal and more focused on how he thinks about ~anthropocene phenomena~ (EX: the chapters on the cave drawings, Kentucky bluegrass, and Monopoly). These were chapters where I felt like I gained something new. While I found plenty of John Green's musings on his own anxieties relatable and it was nice to learn more about his life (origin story of the writing I love so much!), I wish he had included more of the other stuff - the actual reviewing of the anthropocene, in addition to the personal context of the review. For people who are hoping to read a book about the anthropocene, look elsewhere; this is more of a book about John Green (which, I must stress, is also okay!!). 2. More importantly/frustratingly, this book covers a lot of ground and touches on basically every modern issue from data privacy to ecological crises to socioeconomic inequality, but often does not get very far, either simply raising a concern that no one would disagree with or resulting in some poetically optimistic phrase and star rating. This admittedly felt a little empty at times: I normally love this writing style and I can see how it would be particularly suited to a podcast/audio format, but sometimes I found myself thinking, 'that was a pretty sentence that said basically nothing.' There were plenty of last-paragraph-sentences where I felt like we had finally reached The Great Reflection that the chapter had been building up to only for it to end there. By the end of the book, I feel like I had so many lines of thinking that had started but never finished. I am a big fan of rereading and annotating. Those apps that summarize great literature into 5 key bullet points break my heart. But when I finish reading my favorite books, I feel like I can summarize the key ideas I found most interesting when I'm sharing them with my friends -- and if I wanted to talk about The Anthropocene Reviewed, I'm not sure what I'd say because there is so much I could talk about and yet, few topics explored in enough depth. 3. One thing I did enjoy: it was very cool to find parts of this book familiar, in that some musings reminded me of topics explored in his novels. His chapters on illness and Indianapolis reminded me of The Fault in Our Stars (although I would like to clarify in re pg. 163: what I love about his books is most definitely *not* Indianapolis. Nice, dramatic sentence though, I guess.) and his mentions of his high school years + Strawberry Hill reminded me of Looking for Alaska and the chapter on Hiroyuki Doi's Circle Drawings reminded me of Turtles All The Way Down. I would have loved to learn more about the process behind his writing and how he thinks about his characters -- some kind of chapter on authorship / non-music art / fictional characters or something. But I did appreciate the many beautiful quotes from other authors that he includes throughout! In becoming more acquainted with his brain and life experiences, I think readers can still get a sense of how their favorite characters and stories came about. Is it ironic that for a book that partially concludes "A species that has only ever found its way to more must now find its way to less", my main reaction is that I wish there was more of it?
John Green covers a variety of topics from the intangible ideas to tangle me objects and I soaked in every piece of it. He weaves facts with his own personal reflections as if this was just his journal of random thoughts and we happened to pick up his diary.
I wish I knew as much as he did. I give this book, 4 stars.
3.5 / 5
it’s hard to review a book of reviews, but this came into my life at a time when it was much needed and i’m very thankful for that. the things i love most about john green, his hopefulness and earnest-to-the-point-of-cringe outlook on life shine throughout this collection. i read it as an audiobook, but i can’t wait to get my hands on a physical copy so i can return to my favorite passages and begin lending it out to friends :)
Highlights
For me, art is a kind of landing site in the wilderness. Art is where I go when I do not know where else to go. Art can help me to see what I will never see—not just orbital sunrises, but the way down stuff too abstract and nebulous to have a name. Through art, paradoxes of consciousness resolve for me. I see what I will never see. I know what I will never know. And I survive what I will not survive.
Depression is exhausting. It gets old so fast listening to the elaborate prose of your brain tell you that you’re an idiot for even trying. When the game is being played, I feel certain it will never end. But that is a lie. Like most certainties. Now always feels infinite and never is.
Art is also picking a light blue for your layer of the world’s largest ball of paint, knowing that it will soon be painted over, and painting anyway.
It’s a small reminder now that memory is not so much a camera as a filter. The particulates it holds onto are nothing compared to what leaks through.
One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be. The ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of.
The pleasure isn’t owning the person. The pleasure is this—having another contender in the room with you.
I hope these alien anthropologists would like us. We are, in spite of it all, a charismatic species.
Paradoxically, because they didn’t know me, they knew me far better than anyone in my real life.
…I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the cork to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply. Our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.
…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.
Depression is exhausting. It gets old so fast, listening to the elaborate prose of your brain tell you that you’re an idiot for even trying. When the game is being played, I feel certain it will never end. But that is a lie, like most certainties. Now always feels infinite and never is. I was wrong about life’s meaninglessness when I was a teenager, and I’m wrong about it now. The truth is far more complicated than mere hopelessness.
Despair isn’t very productive. That’s the problem with it. Like a replicating virus, all despair can make is more of itself. If playing What’s Even the Point made me a more committed advocate for justice or environmental protection, I’d be all for it. But the white light of despair instead renders me inert and apathetic. I struggle to do anything. It’s hard to sleep, but it’s also hard not to. I don’t want to give in to despair; I don’t want to take refuge in the detached ridicule of emotion. I don’t want to be cool if cool means being cold to or distant from the reality of experience.
The thing about this game is that once my brain starts playing it, I can’t find a way to stop. Any earnest defense I try to mount is destroyed instantaneously by the searing white light, and I feel like the only way to survive life is to cultivate an ironic detachment from it. If I can’t be happy, I at least want to be cool. When my brain is playing What’s Even the Point, hope feels so flimsy and naïve—especially in the face of the endless outrages and horrors of human life. What kind of mouth-breathing jackass looks at the state of human experience and responds with anything other than absolute despair? I stop believing in the future. There’s a character in Jacqueline Woodson’s novel If You Come Softly who says that he looks into the future and sees only “this big blank space where I should be.” When I think of the future, I start to only see the big blank space, the whyless bright terror. As for the present, it hurts. Everything hurts. The pain ripples beneath my skin, bone-shocking. What’s the point of all this pain and yearning? Why?
When my mind starts playing What’s Even the Point, I can’t find a point to making art, which is just using the finite resources of our planet to decorate. I can’t find a point to planting gardens, which is just inefficiently creating food that will sustain our useless vessels for a little while longer. And I can’t find a point to falling in love, which is just a desperate attempt to stave off the loneliness that you can never truly solve for, because you are always alone “way down in the dark which is you,” as Robert Penn Warren put it. Except it’s not a darkness. It’s much worse than that. When my brain plays What’s Even the Point, what actually descends upon me is a blizzard of blinding, frozen white light. Being in the dark doesn’t hurt, but this does, like staring at the sun. That Millay poem refers to “the eye’s bright trouble.” It seems to me that the bright trouble is the light you see the first time you open your eyes after birth, the light that makes you cry your first tears, the light that is your first fear. What’s even the point? All this trial and travail for what will become nothing, and soon. Sitting in the airport, I’m disgusted by my excesses, my failures, my pathetic attempts to forge some meaning or hope from the materials of this meaningless world. 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. The plain fact, my brain tells me when it plays this game, is that the universe doesn’t care if I’m here.
Disease only treats humans equally when our social orders treat humans equally
Magie designed the Landlord’s Game to illustrate George’s ideas, and believed that as children played it, they would “see clearly the gross injustice of our present land system.” The Landlord’s Game was similar to Monopoly in many ways: Like Monopoly, it had a square board with properties, and like Monopoly, if you made a bad roll you could go to jail. But Magie released her game with two sets of rules. In one, the goal—like contemporary Monopoly—was to impoverish your opponents and acquire land monopolies. In the other set of rules, “all were rewarded when wealth was created,” as Pilon put it. One set of rules showcased how rent systems enriched landlords while keeping tenants poor, leading to capital over time concentrating in fewer and fewer hands. The other set sought to suggest a better way—in which wealth generated by the many was shared by the many.
When people we love are suffering, we want to make it better. But sometimes—often, in fact—you can’t make it better.
As Emily Dickinson put it, “Hope” is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words And never stops - at all
Elwood is profoundly heroic. In my favorite line of the movie, he says, “Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say . . . ‘In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”
I was back in Orlando, where I’d grown up. It felt like such a failure to be there, living with my parents, unable to do much of anything. I felt like I was nothing but a burden. My thoughts whorled and swirled. I couldn’t ever think straight. I couldn’t concentrate enough to read or write. I was in daily therapy, and taking a new medication, but I felt certain it wouldn’t work, because I didn’t think the problem was chemical. I thought the problem was me, at my core. I was worthless, useless, helpless, hopeless. I was less and less each day.
Susan Sontag wrote that “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” For me, living with depression was at once utterly boring and absolutely excruciating. Psychic pain overwhelmed me, consuming my thoughts so thoroughly that I no longer had any thoughts, only pain. In Darkness Visible, William Styron’s wrenching memoir of depression, he wrote, “What makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come—not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.” I find hopelessness to be a kind of pain. One of the worst kinds. For me, finding hope is not some philosophical exercise or sentimental notion; it is a prerequisite for my survival.
When you have the microphone, what you say matters, even when you’re just kidding. It’s so easy to take refuge in the “just” of just kidding. It’s just a joke. We’re just doing it for the memes. But the preposterous and absurd can still shape our understanding of ourselves and one another. And ridiculous cruelty is still cruel.
You can’t see the future coming—not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us. These days, I often feel like I’m Jerzy Dudek walking out for the second half down 3–0, feeling as hopeless as I do helpless. But of all the unimportant things, football is the most important, because seeing Jerzy Dudek sprint away from that final penalty save to be mobbed by his teammates reminds me that someday—and maybe someday soon—I will also be embraced by people I love. It is May of 2020, fifteen years since Dudek’s spaghetti legs, and this will end, and the light-soaked days are coming.
For days now, my brain has refused to allow me to finish a thought, constantly interrupting with worries. Even my worries get interrupted—by new worries, or facets of old worries