violentdelights 's review for:

The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green

3.5

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This is ultimately a hopeful book, but it's filled with an anxiety that makes me feel as if I read the book just a little too late. Though we are still deeply in the pandemic, being five years removed from lockdown has turned what was once a thrumming anxiety into a bleak resignation, and the palpability of Green still in that highly anxious state makes the hopefulness just that much harder to grasp on to. 

There were, of course, parts of it that made me confront my own humanity, and my own frailty, and that of course made me cry. In particular, if you are like me and are prone to living in a bubble of your own existence, I highly recommend the essay “Humanity’s Temporal Range.” That essay is immediately followed by “Halley’s Comet,” another essay that made me cry by confronting me with the passage of time and forcing me to reflect on the past and future together so it was really a double whammy. Those essays in particular felt like I was seeing the Time Knife a la Chidi “The Good Place” Anagonye, like time was folding in on itself and I was made to encounter all of it at once. 

The other essays that hit me hardest were the ones where Green is at his most vulnerable, allowing himself to be, in his own words, “hit where [he] is earnest.” “Harvey”, for example, is an essay less about the movie Harvey (for which Green, unfortunately, could not convince me to care about) and more about Green’s personal experience with mental illness. “Academic Decathlon” is sort of about Green’s experience with the sport(?), but mostly is about the evergreen love for his friend Todd and how one’s love can carry another. “Googling Strangers” isn’t really about anything at all besides Green’s own experiences, and it was so incredibly raw and potent. No notes for any of these essays. 

However, my biggest gripe with my collection is the varying depths of the essays. Like all collections, some essays were stronger than others, but there were some essays that seemed to only touch on an issue before immediately moving forward. In particular, such as “Staphylococcus aureus” dedicating approximately half a sentence to antibiotic resistance before diving into staph infections as the persistence of life. In this way, some of the essay’s seem trite. I was also shocked by the brevity of the essay on the Internet for someone whose public figure was meteorized alongside YouTube. 

For the weaker essays, this book felt like a commonplace book of John Green’s favourite facts and quotes, strung together loosely by a narrative of his own musings on said facts and quotes. For the stronger essays, the book felt like a mirror, a vision of someone being so open and truthful and caring so much about life that you cannot help but find yourself reflecting the same back into the book. Either way, I learned something either about the world or myself that I will carry with me forever. 

I give The Anthropocene Reviewed three and a half stars.