I highly recommend to anyone. John Green shares a mental health story so bravely, he enlightens you on the history of a variety of topics, and he is so very much like every one of us. He and the book amazed me. I laughed and cried, I was horrified and it warmed my heart. Even my indifferent 11 and 13 year olds opted to listen to some of it. 

I don't much like John Green's fiction. I don't actively DISlike it, but it always seems to be a bit too light on the plot and characterization end and too heavy handed on the philosophical end. They're fine if not a bit heady, but John Green was made for nonfiction. We love his Crash Courses, his YouTube videos, his real life advocacy, and his podcasts. And this is that. Even down to its cadence and organization, this is just John Green having a highly consumable conversation with the reader that also helps them feel more encouraged about this life, even despite the many moments that suggest we should be panicking, even despite the occasional, poorly-veiled social advocacy moments.. He delivers a peacful philosophy despite it all. This is officially a new favorite book of mine. I need to go get a physical copy now.

While I don't include audiobook performance in my star rating of a book itself, I have the unique experience here of being able to critique the same person twice. Because John Green is an incredibly gifted speaker, and because I believe that audiobooks voiced by the author themselves have the potential to be the best of their kind, there's nothing about this narration that didn't hit the mark. I give John Green reading his own book the Anthropocene Reviewed... 5 stars.

This book is an enigmatic ode to life in the form of essays written by famed author John Green. They consider the Anthropocene which is  the current geological age (for example your Anthropocene is whatever you live through). 

These essays are incredibly moving at points, they can make you laugh and cry as well as provide fun snippets of information you never knew. Throughout them all John often references back to his personal experiences with his mental health which is incredibly written and moving to those who can relate.  

As a burns victim myself one which stuck with me was “googling strangers” which circles around his time as a chaplain in a hospital when a young burns victim came in. He lived years not knowing this kids fate but eventually googled him and was relieved to see the child survived and grew up to live a fulfilling life and as a victim of similar injuries it was moving to see someone similar mentioned and written not as inspiration porn but to show progress and growth despite barriers you may face. 

Overall I was suprised how much I loved this book and will definitely return to it in future. 

I have read (and enjoyed) Turtles All the Way Down, and coming to John Green’s nonfiction in these essays definitely helped me understand where the protagonist with her obsessive thoughts came from.
 
Of the 49 essays that are in the audiobook, I genuinely enjoyed 3 of them and was surprised by another 3. For the rest of the time, it felt like random musings and wanderings in Green’s head. He writes about a wide spectrum of disparate topics, tells the historical context, and ties it to some aspect of the human experience that is usually pretty disturbing and depressing. Especially in the audiobook, his anxiety and despair about the human situation comes out in most of the essays. There were few essays that reflected on the high points of the human experience, and a lot of the essays went dark in unexpected ways that would lead to despair with no solution. Basically I felt like I was inside his anxious brain for 11 hours and it makes me wonder how he even handles his own brain. 

Generally, this book was too long and felt all over the place—if it was shorter with a more selective choice of essays that related to each other in a more explicit way, maybe it would have been more enjoyable. 

This is my new favorite book. I can’t stop recommending it to people. If you need to feel some hope about humanity, this is a great read. It’s a perfect combination of interesting (and funny) facts about history and deeply moving personal narrative, with some philosophical analysis thrown in there. I feel like if I read this book enough times, I would eventually come to understand the meaning of life. I listened to the audiobook with the author’s narration — I highly recommend this format, as it’s much more powerful hearing it in John’s voice. I give The Anthropocene Reviewed five stars.

This is my first John Green book experience, but not my first experience of him. My first experience involve my boyfriend introducing me to VlogBrothers when talking about fond pre-college memories. I have since married this boyfriend and in turn he successfully made me a Nerdfighter. But I was still a jock at heart and reading was still off the table until this year when, as Green puts it, my entire life turned into a "What's the Point?" game.
Read this if you want to learn about the author, the man who has been present since before YouTube and now emerging from the "post" Covid-19 pandemic world. Be enlightened with new ways to describe the fuzzy static that happens during a panic attack with the familiar prose of a John Green video (probably the books too but again, haven't read them. Yet)
Only losing 0.25 because I' m mad i didnt think of this memoir format first, I give The Anthropocene Reviewed 4.75 stars.

I really enjoyed this audiobook - I felt like I learned more about the world and about the author and I definitely want to check out more of John Greens Books now!!