This is Not a Review of The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

I’ve made some remarks about John Green in the past, and as sarcastic and envious as those remarks may or may not have been, I can certainly admit a respect for the man.

But it’s time to let out a little secret: I don’t consider myself a fan of his novels. The problem might be that I came to them late: I read Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars in college, at the insistence of an acquaintance from high school. Some of my friends enjoyed them greatly as teens, but to me the stories and characters were just fine.

But even though the books themselves weren’t my favorite, they did contain lines and ideas that I couldn’t help but admire. Take this passage from The Fault in Our Stars:

“Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.” Those three lines say an awful lot. They call out our cultural obsession of “heroic” battles against illness (as if those who survive cancer diagnoses are inherently more noble than those who don’t) and the need to ascribe a meaning or higher purpose to sicknesses that aren’t our fault. Hazel Grace and Augustus Waters didn’t speak to me the same way they spoke to millions of others, but the ideas that guided them did.

John Green is a great writer, and having read The Anthropocene Reviewed, a collection of essays on what it’s like to be alive in a human-driven epoch of time, I’ve come to realize that he is a fantastic writer of sentences and sentiments. His prose is lyrical without being overdone, hopeful without being syrupy sweet, melancholy without being despairing.

In a passage about ancient cave paintings found, assessed to be in danger, closed to the public, and recreated in France, Green writes:

“We might have graffitied over the paintings, or kept on visiting them until the black mold ate them away entirely. But we didn’t. We let them live on by sealing them off. The cave paintings at Lascaux exist. You cannot visit. You can go to the fake caves we’ve built, and see nearly identical hand stencils, but you will know: This is not the thing itself, but a shadow of it. This is a handprint, not a hand. This is a memory that you cannot return to. And to me, that makes the caves very much like the past they represent.”

This is one of many passages that encapsulate Green’s apparent purpose in the book: zeroing in on subjects that interest him and connecting them both to humanity’s qualities as a whole, and back to himself as an individual. He can do it with an astounding historical artifact like the caves at Lascaux, and with their fake doppelganger created to protect them, and also with a hotdog cart or the Canada goose. In that way, he’s much like old Michel Montaigne, whose essays covered education of children, his own bowel movements, and cannibals. Green finds or projects meaning into snapshots of our world, and it is wonderful to sit and read along.

I loved this book. I loved taking my time with it, and Green’s semi-sarcastic five star rating system for anything and everything he encounters, and his choice to be honest and forthcoming in a world where the dangers of parasocial relationships are at an all-time high.

I enjoyed it greatly, but I will not be reviewing it via star or my vastly superior 5-level thematic criterion system. The Anthropocene Reviewed scores one The Anthropocene Reviewed out of a possible one The Anthropocene Reviewed’s. It’s for sale by fine booksellers everywhere, and available in podcast form where you get podcasts.