“To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry and watch the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”

The human mind has a profound capacity for in-depth perception, and external events that simply happen to us can leave very impactful marks on both our conscious and subconscious minds. One person can look at a hotdog stand remember how exquisite the hotdogs there taste, while somebody else might look at that same hotdog stand and remember how that was the last place he has ever been to with his father before he died of car crash, so that hotdog stand will elicit feelings of melancholy.

Such is the power of our perception, which can be complex, profound and deeply sentimental. This book is a collection of essays by author John Green, essays he wrote during the confinement caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this nonfiction work, he writes about several topics, from a bacterial infection he had, which leads us to a discussion about the dangers of antibiotic tolerance, to a trip he had in Iceland with his friends, to CNN. The topics are far-reaching and quite diverse, and John Green certainly expands on each topic, connecting it to other seemingly random ideas he comes up with as he writes.

This was a sentimental and sweet book, where we get to experience the world through John Green's anxious and sensitive eyes. Unfortunately, despite the occasional "aw", this book didn't do much for me. Despite being a collection of essays where he writes about his individual experience, I found most of the topics and perspectives to be rather typical and cliche. I didn't feel like he brought anything new to the table, and just kept reiterating his starry-eyed wonder of the world and our existence, which I honestly have grown tired of, since I've seen it too many times elsewhere.Most of the essays here were forgettable and I am left not having retained any valuable information, and having expected to come out of this having read the perspectives of someone else, with his potentially unique takes on things, I felt like the only thing I ended up soaking in was the starry-eyed and typically sentimental writing that brings nothing new and interesting, so this book was just a collection of several "seen it before"'s.The fact that life is a miracle we are lucky enough to witness, and how so many good people die before their time, and how helpless and anxious we might feel at times, are all things I've heard so many people talk about, so reading about these experiences all over again just made me see this book as overly corny.

Sorry John Green, but I don't seem to care about these essays that just regurgitated cliches after cliches.I give this 2.5 stars for the effort, and it was mostly forgettable and drowns in the ocean of other similar collective sentiments I grew up hearing.I recommend this book if you enjoy reading about these topics, and seeing a highly sentimental starry eyed view of the world.



 “I'll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them--and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us.”