Just wonderful

What an absolute fun and enjoyable read.

A selection of the things that I learned while reading this book:
- you should never predict the end of the world, you will almost certainly be wrong
- the tail of Halley's comet extends more than sixty million miles through space
 - are conditioning systems in many buildings are biased to cater to men's temperature preferences
- basically all penicillin in the world descends from a mold found on a cantaloupe (and the scientists ate it after scraping off the mold)
- lawn maintenance creates more carbon dioxide than the lawns can capture
- Monopoly was actually invented by a woman

Before starting this book officially I had already read a single chapter of it about a year ago, the one titled "Auld Lang Syne." I had actually never actively heard of the song (though I am sure I had heard it before passively in a movie or something similar) and I found it so beautiful that I listened to it on repeat and then did a university assignment on it. I too would like to give Auld Lang Syne five stars.

Each first edition book of this title was signed by John Green. He made a video about this on the Youtube channel he shares with his brother Hank, explaining that his signature didn't make books worth more because by now, he has signed so many of them. However, I would like to claim an exception to this in this very instance. While every single book of this first edition was supposed to have a signature, mine has not. Thus, by NOT having a signature I would actually argue that my first edition of this book is worth more than the other ones. Oh how the tables have tabled. I give this book five stars.

I did not expect for a John Green non-fiction book to become one of my favorite books but here we are.

I very casually read a couple of John Green's fiction books when I was younger but I grew out of that brand of YA pretty quickly. When I heard about The Anthropocene Reviewed I expected more of the same, but I was incredibly surprised.

If you need some joy and hope with a twinge of bittersweet sadness during this hell of a pandemic, I cannot recommend this book. This book helped me find beauty in the mundane but to cope with some of the most horrific parts of life in a way that didn't feel like either romanticization or denial. I especially adored the explorations of mental health and community throughout the entire book.

While I did like John Green's writing style previously, it never really stuck with me but I think the format and subject material of this book made it really stick with me. 

This book was an incredibly intense rollercoaster with high highs and low lows, that still managed to give me hope for the future and remind myself of the beauty that humanity can be.

Green's books always leave me feeling a little more hopeful. His wit and lyricism are even more evident in essay form than in a novel. There are as many funny, wacky facts in this book as you would expect from a celebrity nerd.
My only criticisms are that for a book that claims to review the Anthropocene it is obscenely American in perspective (despite a couple of essays being on non-American topics/stories); and that, if you've followed John Green for a few years, even if you don't listen to the Anthropocene podcast, a lot of these stories will be at least familiar to your ears.