Over summer break, we all read, or at least were supposed to read, The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. Opinions varied from love to hate across the Breck community; However, from my perspective, I loved the book. Green weaved his personal experiences effortlessly with facts and quotes, adding in his own lessons about life and the world. When looking at each title in the table of contents you may think that each story sounds random or insignificant, but he finds a way to give meaning to each small thing, especially in the stories The Indianapolis 500 and The Notes App. You may think that The Indianapolis 500 will just be about racecars or their drivers, but really it’s a love story for his hometown, Indianapolis and how it’s one of the many things Covid temporarily deprived us of. The Notes App was an essay where he took one note he had written himself in the app, from 2019 – 2010, creating a series of artifacts from each year sharing something about himself and together creating a little life story. These are two examples of lots of wonderful essays that beautifully outline the human experience and how we make the planet worse for the wear but in some ways infinitely better.
-Caroline
When I first heard the summer reading book was a collection of essays, I was actually interested. I thought it would be a new and compelling view on the world, but I ended up being disappointed. There were a lot of reasons I didn’t enjoy this book, but the main one for me was that I just didn’t connect with his thoughts. I had heard of him before, but never read any of his other books, so maybe that contributed to my dislike, but I also didn’t find his perspective interesting. I feel like he could’ve given us a really fresh take on life, as he had to learn about living with his disease, labyrinthitis, but he never mentions it after the introduction. He does say he doesn’t want to use it as a metaphor for his life, but he didn’t have to over complicate things to tell us about his struggle with it. Not only did I find it boring, but it also felt very long. 318 pages doesn’t seem very long until you realize it’s actually 44 completely unrelated essays about anything and everything, ranging from Kentucky Bluegrass to The QWERTY keyboard. All in all, I found the book boring, unfocused, and disappointing
-Grace
