Hello and welcome to the Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast where we review different facets

of the Human-centered planet on a five-star scale.

I'm John Green, and today I'll be reviewing a particular Ginkgo-Biloba tree about a half

mile from my home on the northwest side of Indianapolis.

Before that though, I have to say a quick thank you to everyone who has read the Anthropocene

Reviewed book, which debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and has

been welcomed into the world with extraordinary generosity.

Hearing your responses to the book via email, via tweet, or strangest of all via reviews

on a five-star scale has meant a great deal to me.

Thank you for reading it and thanks for sharing it.

Okay so when I was in college, I took a class in American Religion where we read one of

those mid 19th century American novels that luxuriates in description.

Moby Dick is the classic example of the genre, but this novel was a far lesser entry in the

canon of verbosity.

I no longer remember the title or the plot of this book.

All I can recall is this one passage which went on for pages and pages where the author

described a tree.

Every knob and every branch, every leaf and ridge of bark were elucidated as if the reader

had never previously seen a tree.

Thinking about this passage now, I'm reminded of Gertrude Stein's essay, What Are Masterpieces

and Why Are There So Few Of Them, where she writes that the difficulty of writing novels

in the 20th century is that quote, the tradition has always been that you may more or less

...