The good news in John Green’s reviews of Diet Dr Pepper and sunsets

According to John Green’s wife, “when people write reviews, they are really writing a kind of memoir—here’s what my experience was eating at this restaurant or getting my hair cut at this barbershop.” She made this point upon reading an early iteration of Green’s review of Diet Dr Pepper. (For reasons that baffle me, Green is more than a little obsessed with it.) In the first draft of the review, Green adopted the stance of an impartial evaluator. After receiving his wife’s wise counsel, Green revised his assessment of the soft drink, writing himself into it.

Thus The Anthropocene Reviewed was conceived—first as a wildly popular podcast and now as a wildly popular book. Green reviews a disparate array of subjects that ultimately have only one thing in common: they are aspects of the “human-centered planet” that caught his attention and have some relevance to his life. The four-star Diet Dr Pepper review is tucked between an appraisal of scratch ’n’ sniff stickers and an analysis of how Jurassic Park shaped our collective imagi­nation of velociraptors. The raptors come in a half star lower than scratch ’n’ sniff stickers, which feels wrong. But you have to take into consideration that these stars are being doled out by a singular judge. Who can blame Green for being more enthusiastic about stickers than velociraptors when the stickers still off-gas the aroma of his childhood?

Since any review of Green’s collection of reviews will also be a kind of memoir—here’s my experience of reading this book—I’ll admit that if I hadn’t already been familiar with Green’s oeuvre of humane young adult books and endearing web projects, I might have rolled my eyes. I’m ambivalent about the rise of the user review. It’s one thing to write a Yelp report on one’s experience at the local pub. But who does this guy think he is, crowning himself the assessor of sycamore trees?