Book Review: The Anthropocene Reviewed
Book Review: The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green
Read: 04/08/2022 - 27/05/2024
My rating: 4 /5 stars
Book of 2024: 5
The Anthropocene Reviewed is an open-hearted exploration of the paths we forge and an unironic celebration of falling in love with the world.
I first started this back in 2022, after having bought a signed copy at Toppings in Bath (the infamous birthday bookshop-crawl that I cannot stop referencing). I read up to Chapter 11 but with my ever-restless brain I needed a novel to sink my teeth into, needed a consistent story to stay stuck in my head.
I restarted this via audiobook, as I worked away in one of the bedrooms of Max’s new house while he renovated in another room. The audiobook is voiced by John Green, in his considerate, deadpan, delectable drawl. It’s nice to learn some facts, hear some opinions, and giggle occasionally.
One thing I found most profound about this exploration into life on Earth, was the thread pulled through it all. As the blurb accurately says, this book explores falling in love with the world we live in. The book was crafted from an earlier set of podcast episodes, and some were repurposed, but some were written entirely for this book, I believe. Green weaves yarn of joy, and loss, and grief, and hope throughout. It seems an impossible task to manage that during a pandemic, and through the medium of text in which he’s wading through. But he manages it. Greatly.
I particularly enjoyed the entries on:
Bonneville Salt Flats
Whispering
Wintry Mix
The World’s Largest Ball of Paint
It’s beautiful… Seriously so. I’d recommend it if you’re in a place of inaction, or a state of contemplation, of reflection, in your life.
This collection of reviews is wholesome, sad, hopeful, devastating, worrisome, elegant. A wondrous walk through time, the world, the way we are, the way we aren’t.
Reading this in 2024 is a transformative experience - taking me back to 2020, in the height of the pandemic, the place I was then, the place I am now. How far, and how little humans have come in the meantime.
There are some especially hopeful and inspiring ideas and passages:
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. (7)
And so I try to turn toward that scattered light, belly out, and I tell myself: This doesn’t look like a picture. And it doesn’t look like a god. It is a sunset, and it is beautiful. (99)
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. (106)
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. (188)
Our gazes entwined. I felt calmer. I was thinking about the people I used to be, and how they fought and scrapped and survived for moments like this one. (190)
I think engrossed is what I really want to feel most of the time. It’s such an ugly word, “engrossed”, for such an absolutely beautific experience. (192)
Even though we know that none of our marks will truly last, that time is coming not just for all of us but for all we make, we can’t stop scribbling, can’t stop seeking relief wherever we can find it. (194)
I will begin to understand for the first time in my life that I am not just made for Earth, but also of it. (220)
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. (221)
What you’re looking at matters, but not as much as how you’re looking or who you’re looking with. (221)
I’m not sure why I find it beautiful to devote oneself obsessively to the creation of something that doesn’t matter, but I do. (247)
Maybe in the end art and life are more like the world’s largest ball of paint. You carefully choose your colours, and then you add your layer as best you can. (249)
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. (249)
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. (254)
There is also a horizon we cannot see past. (265)
I remember that I won’t survive, of course. 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. (274)
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