The Anthropocene Reviewed

I've never listened to the podcast, but I thoroughly enjoyed this audiobook. Through a series of seemingly unrelated essay topics, Green tells a story of what it is to be a reflective person living in the Anthropocene – the age of humans. Each essay ends in a rating out of five stars, which is indicative of how we tend view the world around us: how it adds to our singular life, our singular perspective, our singular enjoyment.

As the essays build – and they range from “Air Conditioning” to “CNN” to “The Notes App” to “Sunsets” – we learn about these topics, and the author, and the painful and desperate and hopeful times of the pandemic. The act of reviewing exposes so much of ourselves and our emotional states, and in that way, this is more like a memoir than anything else. Each new chapter beings a new topic and is refreshed with new anecdotes, so it never feels stale. That, and some of the writing is so good, and so relevant and powerful, you'll have to stop to rewind/reread and turn the phrases over a few more times and let them dissolve like a hard candy in your mouth. I learned a lot about a whole variety of random things, but what I really appreciated about this book is that it felt like a warm, friendly hug at the end of a really hard time (the pandemic being the hard time).

If I have any complaints, it's only that some of the chapters were less interesting or vulnerable than others, but writing that out feels like such a minor complaint. This is a pandemic book that gets at the pandemic better than any other book I've read (/listened to), because it's so rich in context that doesn't even read like context until you realize everything is context.

Now I'm waxing. I give this book 4.5 stars.