Although I love most of the media output from John and Hank Green of Vlogbrothers fame, I’ve never really got into John Green’s books. I don’t read a lot of YA. I’ve got plenty of frankly excruciating memories of adolescence as it is and have no desire to revisit it. However, I love his podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed, which takes the way we five-star review everything these days and superimposes it onto various things that inform and have been informed by humanity. That sounds like a nonsense concept – because it is – but Green is a great writer and he really makes it work. He’s now developed some of those essays further, written some new ones, and compiled them into a book. If you’re familiar with John Green’s general media output, you’ll know roughly what to expect in terms of content. Lots of honest but hopeful mental health chat, earnest treatment of silly subjects and silly treatment of earnest ones, extremely deep dives on the most mundane or peculiar things. In fact, I think that’s an area where Green has improved as a writer since he started The Anthropocene Reviewed podcast. In the early episodes, I sometimes felt that the stories were being tortured a bit to end up at whatever analogy or meaning he’d extracted from them, and I found that as well in the one novel I’ve read by him (Turtles All The Way Down). I didn’t experience that at all listening to the book – all his analytical thinking and conclusions felt reasonable and earned.
This is an essay collection steeped in the pandemic. Even chapters which had their genesis as episodes of the podcast, aired long before 2020, have been substantially rewritten for a new context. If I’d listened to this last year, it might have been too much, but actually – because I’ve had my first jab, I’ve seen my family, and I’ve had my first hug since Feburary 2020 – it felt quite manageable. I listened to this as an audiobook, but I may buy the paperback when it comes out. Because this successfully captured so much of what was strange or awful about the past eighteen months, I think it would be a good thing to have a copy of as a record of the time. If, some time in the future, I have nieces or nephews, or grand-godchildren (godgrandchildren?), and they want to know what the pandemic felt like, I think this book might be a good answer, at least from my own experience. This also means that this didn’t feel too much like a podcast book, but just a book in its own right. I did wonder if this would be just episodes of the podcast tarted up a bit, but most of the essays felt fresh and new. They cover all sorts of things – the American grocery chain Piggly Wiggly; the Indy 500; the world’s largest ball of paint; plague; a particular Icelandic hot dog stand; the Liverpool footballer Jerzy Dudek; the song Auld Lang Syne; scratch ‘n’ sniff stickers; viral meningitis. Sometimes the chapters are a deep dive into the history of the item, person or place; sometimes they are about Green’s own experience with the thing; commonly, it’s a mix of both. At one point, he refers to it as a sort of memoir, but I prefer the description he gives in his introduction: it’s an attempt to really pay attention to what he pays attention to. As enthusiastic non-fiction readers know, almost anything is interesting if you look deeply enough. This book is certainly testament to that.
In addition to being interesting, this is also an extraordinarily kind and human book, and in this it reflects the podcast. The Anthropocene Reviewed episode that came out as a one-off in late September 2020 was on the subject of plague. I’ve linked it at the bottom of this review. I initially tried to listen to it while I was working, but I had to walk away from my computer completely and just give up on work for a while because it made me properly cry. At the time, we were clearly heading for a second national lockdown in the UK, though it wouldn’t be announced for several weeks. I don’t think that I’ve ever been as viscerally afraid of anything, at least as an adult, as I was of that looming second lockdown. It turned out to be slightly less severe than the spring 2020 lockdown, but that wasn’t clear until they announced it. I could foresee another n months of being alone, going outside my flat once or twice a week to buy food but otherwise never interacting with anyone made of flesh and blood rather than pixels. The episode focuses on how difficult it is to be alone and isolated when the whole world is going mad. He talks about the Derbyshire village, Eyam, that chose to quarantine itself in 1665 to prevent the bubonic plague from spreading to its neighbours – and what a sacrifice that would have been, and the fact that it ultimately worked. Throughout this whole period, I have really felt (however unjustly) like I am being asked to pay for other people’s physical health with my mental health – which I’ve done, but I has been an extremely painful trade-off. Somehow, Green actually put that feeling into words, but managed to articulate it in combination with a hopefulness that had been completely lacking in the news. The Plague essay is one of those that was substantially rewritten for the book, which I appreciated – it would have been easy for Green to justify including that very recent episode as-is, but it was nice to have a new perspective.
The essay about sycamore trees was perhaps my favourite, even though it’s one of the few that was largely a repeat. In it, Green tells the story of a mental health crisis he had a few years ago, and a sycamore tree he saw while out on a walk with his son during that time. He doesn’t make the trite argument that looking at a sycamore tree alleviated his depression. Rather, the depression was being gradually brought back under control with medication and therapy and other proper medical treatment, and the result of that was that the beauty of the sycamore tree struck him with much greater force than usual. Like most people, I imagine, I know this feeling. I can still remember a bunch of cowslips that I saw growing out of a crack in the pavement when I was going through a very miserable season – not a mental health crisis, exactly, but certainly a very sad period in my life. Everything had been grey and awful for so long, and that burst of bright yellow forcing its way out of the ground was so intensely beautiful that it made me cry. Of course, I wouldn’t have cried over the cowslips if I hadn’t spent days (months?) almost always on the point of tears one way or another, but now I don’t really remember the grief of that time. I remember the cowslips. I think that’s what worked so well for me about this essay collection – even though Green is talking about such specific experiences or concepts, he has a way of capturing human experiences that feels very universal.
This wasn’t one of my 20 Books of Summer – I started listening to it when it first came out, and it kept me company as I gradually worked on clearing my extremely overgrown new allotment. I had a few essays left when 20 Books of Summer started and I figured I would get to them eventually, but the other night I had a bout of insomnia and finished the rest of the book in the wee small hours. It really is a keeping-you-company sort of book, and I’m always grateful when a book accomplishes that, but it’s particularly appreciated right now, with the memories of fifteen months of alone time still extremely fresh in my head. Green is brutally honest about his own struggles and difficulties – “these days, I am crying most of the time” – and I think that’s what makes it an especially timely book, though it’s my understanding that he was already writing it pre-March 2020. It’s a funny, sad, fascinating, engrossing, and compassionate series of essays that, overall, I enjoyed very much. I will probably listen to some of the essays again – the Indy 500 one has stayed with me, for example – and, as I’ve said, I expect I’ll buy a paperback as well, as a record of this strange season.
I cut star ratings from my reviews a long time ago, after experiences where I either hated a technically accomplished book or loved one that I knew was objectively not good, but in keeping with the spirit of these essays: I give The Anthropocene Reviewed five stars.
“I have really felt (however unjustly) like I am being asked to pay for other people’s physical health with my mental health” – yes, I think that’s why I’ve always been ambivalent about lockdowns. Being a natural hermit I’ve been less affected than many people, but I did feel that we should probably have made more effort to shield the vulnerable and let the rest of society continue to function, especially, I must say, younger people who have missed out on so much at such an important stage of their lives. I suspect that even once we’re all vaccinated and pretty safe from Covid, we’ll be paying the price for lockdowns for a long time to come.
Yes, I agree about young people – part of my job (and during the last year, one of the biggest parts of my job) is to run clinical supervision for my children’s nursing students while they’re on placement. The case studies they’re bringing for discussion of children’s mental health crises and/or major safeguarding issues that normally would have been picked up by school or other services are pretty horrific – the kind of thing I would have seen about every six months in practice but now seem to be extremely common.
That said, I have been reluctantly convinced of the value of lockdowns after hearing stories from colleagues seconded from child health to adult ITUs – but I think it is going to take a long time and a lot of investment before we’ve really paid the full social cost of over a year of lockdown.
This is a lovely, thoughtful review. I wasn’t going to read this one because although I’ve read and enjoyed some of Green’s fiction, I’d found it a bit repetitive. This sounds like something new though. Like your cowslips, I’ve never forgotten a January walk at the end of a particularly hard time, when I thought for the first time that things might turn out okay after all. Funny how universal some of our loneliest experiences actually are. And while I do believe the lockdowns around the world have saved lives I can also believe that we will be sorting out the psychological and social effects of them for years to come.
Thank you! Yes, it’s very different from what I’ve read of his fiction.
I also think the lockdowns have saved lives and were probably the right thing, broadly speaking, but I think it’s going to be a long time before we’re able to work our lives saved vs lives lost due to related factors, and that’s terribly sad. At least there’s light at the end of the tunnel, though!
I found our second lockdown that began in the fall much harder than the first too and I think it was because I knew what we were going into. And I say that knowing how privileged I was to be with my family. As we come out of it now I see the toll it has all taken on people I know. I’m recognizing it even in my own kids despite our best efforts to shelter them and I wonder a lot what it will mean for their generation as they grow up.
“As enthusiastic non-fiction readers know, almost anything is interesting if you look deeply enough. “<- so true! I find that a good author can make me care about nearly any topic.
Like you, I'm starting to be able to read about the pandemic and I think that has become approachable for me because I've reached the same milestones you have. I know the rest of the world isn't at normal yet, but having my life get closer to normal has made it easier to reflect.
Yes – there are still a lot of restrictions in place in the UK, but I’ve been able to do a little bit of teaching in person, which has made a world of difference to me – it’s those moments of normality that are making it feel different this time.
Much as others are saying, the trade off of physical for mental health is a tough one. And in the U.S., we’re in a different place. We closed everything non-essential for about 50 days. Masks were so hit and miss, mostly miss. Vaccines would kill us, COVID was a hoax, etc. But now, we’re to the point where the messaging to the American public is anyone who isn’t vaccinated is taking their own physical safety into their hands, and those who are fully vaccinated are free to go about their lives. Another blogger friend of mine who works at a pharmacy said they’re throwing out vaccines constantly, because anyone who wanted one got one and now there’s no desire for it. However, I have some folks around me who keep trying to scare me, saying the Delta variant is going to get me if I don’t put a mask on again. Here’s the deal: I find wearing a mask causes me anxiety. I did it faithfully the entire pandemic until I was fully vaccinated. I’m fully vaccinated, as is everyone around me at home and work. I don’t want to wear a mask to protect people who refuse to get a vaccine — no money, no insurance, no ID required — and have anxiety. Perhaps the people who are fully vaccinated and telling me they’re wearing their masks to protect others are also afraid for themselves….?
Masks are very difficult. They’re still mandatory in the UK and likely to remain so for a long time. That’s partly because our vaccine rollout is taking a long time (because we’re an extremely pro-vaccine country so everyone wants it, which is good news). Also, we have a lot of Delta variant and cases are on the up. But, like you, I hate wearing a mask – I’ve regularly had to abandon my shopping trolley at the supermarket and run outside so I can take my mask off before I have a panic attack. Autism is one of the conditions that’s exempt from the law because of the associated sensory issues, but I think getting aggro from strangers about not wearing a mask would probably be worse than wearing one! But the minute the law changes I will stop wearing one with immense relief.
Because you are a nurse, that makes me feel a bit better about my position. Perhaps it sounds selfish, but I did my part. I did it diligently without complaint. I didn’t go a single place, see a single person outside of work other than my husband, enter an establishment without a mask — nothing — from March 2020 to May 2021. I just want to pause and say you’re doing an amazing job. I can’t imagine doing the pandemic without a housemate or spouse, someone else living with me. I’m glad we did video chats during that time. I know it’s not the same, but I hope it cheered you a bit. I know it made me so happy to see you!
Yes, I really enjoyed our video chats and it definitely helped! Spending that much time alone was rough, but I was very grateful to be in a nice home and not have my job at risk, so it’s really swings and roundabouts. I think we’ve all had difficult pandemics, just difficult in different ways.