Deana Birks

My son has been listening to more audiobooks since getting a job across town and needing something to occupy his mind on his commute. He recommended John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed, saying he connected more with it than with any book he’d read in years.

I decided to give it a try, choosing to listen to the audiobook as well since it was read by the author.

John Green is closer to my age than my son’s age and although my son and I are both big readers there aren’t many authors we both like. John Green is one. Rainbow Rowell is another.

I didn’t deeply connect with this book the way my son did, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit. A departure from Green’s fiction, this is a series of personal essays. It was written during 2020, and as a general rule I avoid reading anything about the pandemic because we all lived through it and I don’t want to hear about it but there was enough other content that didn’t let it bother me.

The throughline to the essays is that each of them is a review of something he loves or hates, so that rather than simply a memoir or collection of unrelated thoughts, he pulls everything together at the end of each essay by giving each topic a rating. Topics range from Velociraptors to Air-Conditioning to Super Mario Kart to The QWERTY Keyboard. Some are funny or awkward or informative and some get sad without being overly sentimental. There is some nostalgia and some realism and a lot of heart.

I didn’t love it but I thoroughly liked it. I give The Anthropocene Reviewed four stars.