I really didn't think that I'd be giving John Green a 5 star review in 2025. But. I found this collection of essays - with the exception of the sports-related ones - incredibly relatable. 

Green is anxious and quite nihilistic, which isn't always the easiest point of view to read from, but it is one that is very familiar to me. It brings me a lot of peace and hope to read about the often mundane things that make Green feel grounded and hopeful. I feel like some of the pieces in this collection really helped me to believe that maybe I can become a more hopeful person, or at least a nihilistic person who can be grounded and reminded that humanity isn't always awful.

My favourite, as I did expect it to be (as a person who is Scottish), was the Auld Lang Syne essay. I first heard it on the vlogbrothers channel when Green read this essay, and it has been one of the few youtube videos that I have rewatched numerous times over the years.

Anthropocene. I've never heard that word before. But it means: 

Wow. I really loved this book! When Storygraph's Onboarding Reading Challenge had a prompt for reading your least read genre, I thought it would be short stories, or nonfiction. But it was essays. I didn't think I had any other essay books other than Virginia Woolf, and I didn't want to read those right now. But when I saw John Green's book, The Anthropocene Reviewed, was an essay book, I was intrigued, and excited to pick it up as an audiobook, which is narrated by John Green himself. Listening to authors reading their own book is always a delight, especially if it is their memoir or autobiography. I was surprised by how meta this book was, the way it referenced that this was an audiobook while I was listening to it, and some nature sounds as well. It made the audiobook experience very engaging! Some essays were very engaging and interesting, and John Green covers a lot of topics in here that I was very interested in, like shows, memories, grief, COVID-19, chronic illness, anxiety, and just a lot of other random little things that I've experienced or remembered that I was not expecting him to reference in this book. The other essays were a little too random for me, but overall, I related a lot to the topics that were discussed in this book. I also really liked the way that he rated the essays after talking about them. Listening to this book from a perspective where we are out of COVID-19 and listening to him talk about a 'new normal' made this book a totally new experience! And for that, I give The Anthropocene Reviewed 4.5 stars!

Reading this book made me not want to give the book a star review, as it d esn't do it justice haha. That said, I think it is a must read for anyone who often feels the world is too much, as it is a beautiful musing in what it means to be human.

The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is for how much time Green spends talking about the global pandemic. Which maybe it's just still to soon, and were I to read this in a decade I wouldn't mind as much.

Some of these hit very deep, but a couple of the ones dealing with football and sports didn't so much. Overall it reminded me of the simple prose that Green uses and why I liked his books so much, might even use one or two of these as class reading material for my students.