Downtime: The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

My goal this year is to read 25 books, and to kick it off, I read The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. It’s been on my TBR since 2021. When it was released, and in the first week of 2026, I made the drive to the Barnes and Noble and made a beeline (more like meandered with a purpose, because I wasn’t able to find it at first) for this book. Ringing in at 318 pages, The Anthropocene Reviewed contains 46 essays, with a notes section at the end that expands upon the essays and adds more context. 

The essays span a range of things that involve culture, nature, phenomena, and everything in between. Forgive me for what I’m about to say: I skip introductions of books. Granted, I usually read fiction and just want to get to the story, but I read this book’s intro. It gave context to the essays and helped readers understand the care that went into writing them, along with the acknowledgment of a nonlinear timeline and the fact that some essays were written well before the book was published, with no book in mind. The book was written in the way that you should be reading it: Not all at once, but picking it up from time to time when something interests you.

Take that advice with a grain of salt: I pulled an all-nighter to read it, hoping to reset my sleep schedule before I went back to school. I think it helped me stay awake because it wasn’t the same plot, I wasn’t following a story–the subject was constantly changing, and the essays varied in length. John Greene’s informative but comedic tone keeps you interested, making you laugh unexpectedly and appreciate the things in the world that you previously haven’t (‘Lascaux Cave Paintings,’ ‘Teddy Bears,’ ‘Harvey,’ ‘The Notes App,’ ‘The QWERTY Keyboard,’ and ‘The Ginkgo Tree’). You can feel the care he pours into the pages, the love, rage, sadness, happiness, and grief that he carries with him every day. 

I wouldn’t necessarily classify Green as a celebrity, but I wouldn’t classify him as just an author. He has a large online presence. He is involved in a lot of educational projects, such as podcasts and YouTube videos, including his YouTube series, which he created with his brother, Hank, Crash Course, educational videos that teachers have been playing all throughout middle school, high school, and now college. This book feels (rightfully so, as some essays started out as content for other online projects) like an extension of his posts. Where Everything is Tuberculosis was serious, and informative, this book is light, funny, and, a lot of times, educational. 

This is a stark difference from his usual books, as he is known for YA fiction, with The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, Looking for Alaska, and more. Of course, the narrators of those stories are high school students, but this feels like a book that really allows you to get to know Green as a person and not just an author. Every essay is not only an informative piece, it also details his personal connection to it and the stories that led him to what he is talking about, and how he carries it with him still every day. I look forward to any nonfiction books Green may publish in the future, even though I still hope to catch up on his fiction. I rated this book 4 stars on my Goodreads profile.