I didn’t think anyone would have looked wistfully out the window remembering ordinary life before 2020, but here we are.

Nearly two years later, our world is so different, and yet starting to once again look the same. The airport is no longer a sea of masked faces, rock concerts are back and many people have returned to the office and chat at the water cooler again. City Council meetings don’t require you to wipe the microphone off between public comments about sidewalks and density and traffic any more. We don’t try to stand six feet apart in the line like we used to, stepping on the brightly colored circles drawn on the floor.

Everything looks in its right place, exactly where we left it.

Except, it’s not. One million Americans are missing from their chairs around the dinner table, countless familiar restaurants and bars closed their doors and nearly everyone I know experienced a darkness of some sort in the year we spent by ourselves, post-virus spread and pre-vaccine.

Things are starting to open again, but we are still living in the liminal space between the deeply strange world of empty pandemic streets and normal life. It’s a peculiar time, which I would argue calls for a peculiar book.

One of the reads that helped me navigate this transition from pandemic life and back into what the world was supposed to be again was John Green’s essay collection “The Anthropocene Reviewed.” Unlike his smash-hit young adult novels, this book takes on an entirely different tone and structure. Instead of a novel, Green here speaks to us as himself and in every essay he “reviews” aspects of modern life.

I’m convinced only Green could pull this off. He masterfully blends cultural commentary and memoir to examine all of the ways ordinary facets of our lives are extraordinary. He tackles everything from the QWERTY keyboard, Monopoly, CNN, a very specific hot dog stand in Iceland, or sunsets and uses it to dig deep into so many aspects of his own life and what it means to be a person. It’s sprinkled with poetry, literary quotes, and snapshots from his life and glitters with the magic of everyday moments.

I’m sure I would have enjoyed this book if the pandemic never happened, but the timing of writing it in the depths of the uncertainty of the early pandemic months gives it so much more. Green uses these essays to confront his own anxieties, the strangeness of life as we knew it shutting down and wondering what comes next. He often speaks to the future where perhaps the pandemic is over, or more under control. His essay on the Indy 500, where he reflects on a year where it didn’t happen, is especially moving. I think we all have that event we missed in 2020 or 2021 that left an empty hole in our lives we weren’t quite expecting to be gutted by that much.

This format also lets Green shine in the area he does best: Monologues. Critics of his highly acclaimed YA novels say these long, often philosophical turns are unrealistic for stories about teenagers and can take away from the narrative. The older I get, I see their point, even if his novels were life-changing reads for me as a teenager. But, here, Green doesn’t need to worry about that because it’s just him, writing and telling us about the world as he sees it and what it means at a time when we’re all trying to pretend nothing changed even though everything did.

I rate this an unequivocal five stars.

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