And yes, home is that house where you no longer live. Home is before and you live in after. But home is also what you’re building and maintaining today…
Away from his standard fiction titles (you might know him from The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska), The Anthropocene Reviewed is a collection of reviews: reviews on the human experience from Mario Kart to Halley’s Comet, Canada Geese to whispering, and everything in between.
I have a special place in my heart for John Green as an author. His ability to portray human experiences in beautifully worded sentences is a true gift, and one I admire greatly. This collection of reviews was unexpected given what I had previously read from him, but written with just as much creativity and passion as his fiction. Some of the reviews are personal, some could double as history lessons, some are nostalgic and some optimistic. All are beautifully written and, in each one, Green shares about his life and his perspective on the human experience.
A small word of warning: this book (or at least a portion of its entries), was written during Covid, and while it is not “about” Covid, the pandemic does come up throughout reviews as it impacts the author’s outlook and introspection. I have had a resistance to reading anything set in or around Covid – almost as though not enough time has passed to read about something we lived through – and while I found the mentions manageable here, I felt it worth a word of warning in the event you, like me, tend to avoid reading about it.
While ironic to review a book about reviews, I’ve given this a 5-star Goodreads rating which, as many of you know, I’m rather stingy about. While an excellent book that I admire immensely and worthy in its own merit, I’ve also chosen to give it five stars as a way of thanking John Green for his vulnerability. I did not agree with all of his ratings nor all of his points, but I was fascinated by the way he saw the world, how he communicated it to the reader, and inspired by the courage to share those thoughts with us. My little rating will probably not register amongst all the others, but I feel he’s shared an authentic part of his soul with us in this collection of reviews, and it’s a vulnerability I’m thankful for. I give The Anthropocene Reviewed five stars.
2% Rating: 9.5/10
Recommend? Definitely
Re-Read? I want to get a physical copy to go back and highlight parts, so I’d say that’s a “yes”.
Time: 1:53
Bonus content: I included one of my favorite lines from the book at the beginning. Living across the country from where I grew up, I got a little teary eyed at the way John Green defines “home”.