Icarus

My entrance to the underworld involves a steep steel staircase. It is narrow, and you must be diligent in your descent. Leaving the light and exhaling into darkness, you are greeted with an open rectangular space of stone and shadow. The arched ceiling draws your eye away from the pockmarked ground that requires careful footing, should you care to cross it. But even as you enter, the space ends. It is closed off with a large stone wall – not bricked, but whole – and you can’t help but feel as if this space is supposed to go further. Perhaps this stone is a mercy. Perhaps it is here to save you.

After my trip in 2018 to the Necromanteion in Greece, I thought all entrances to the underworld – to death and the afterlife – could only look like this. Foreboding, isolating, haunting. Now that I’ve read Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, I know better. You see, the underlands are waiting. And they’re pouring over with colour.

While some of Macfarlane’s destinations are passages to and of death, not all are afterworlds. These are places of deep time, in which “[t]he world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses.” Before I had gone to look up that quote, “vibrant” was actually the word I chose to best describe Underland. “Vibrant” on its own sounds dangerously close to the clipped, one-word reviews that so often plaster book covers, but rest assured I use it here with care.

Certainly, the Paris catacombs or sites of millennium-old cave paintings fit my previous notion of an underland, but Macfarlane brings us even further afield by pointing to our own backyard: the vast mycelium network stretching under each square foot of forest floor. And then, farther, to the sinkholes of the foibe massacres in Italy and Yugoslavia, the vast glaciers of Greenland. As an experienced nature writer and climber, Macfarlane is able to both research and scale these landscapes. Rather than merely describe them, Macfarlane etches the resonances of these places, these moments, and more than a few sentences had me close my eyes, feel the goosebumps raise on my arms, and revel in their unravelling.

I have a great respect for Macfarlane’s decision to not dumb down his terminology, but admittedly I could have used some more explanation on climbing terms. Still, the utmost goal of this book was the flow of language and memory to convey these spaces, as well as showcase the people intertwined with them, which it most certainly succeeded on.

Underland is a vibrant exploration of landscapes left so often unseen. This book is simultaneously immediate and infinitely stretching, flowing over the slow space of language to arrive, eventually, before its reader. Underland is for lovers of nature, adventurous souls, and those drawn to the stranger edges of the world. It is bound to be one of my top non-fiction picks of this year. I am very glad it was my first book of 2025, and the first for me to try my hand at some more highly crafted reviews.

Oh, how to describe this book. What even to compare it to?

Well, it took me only 20 pages to get absolutely enamored by the world building, and just 40 for it to fry my brain. I desperately needed to shake the nearest person by the shoulders and beg them to talk with me about this book. Luckily, I was at home.

Now, normally, I see "war orphan" in a book blurb and my brain wants to push it far away. I'm very glad I didn't, and yet again it's thanks to Jacob Geller's spectacular taste. (Please check out his video essays on YouTube.)

This is a great book for fans of intense sci-fi world building. (I thought the science in Peter Watt's Blindsight was a lot. That now pales in comparison to Exordia.) However, war and genocide and ethics are at the heart of this story, and they demand attention. But godDAMN this man did so much freaking research on militaries and pathology and math and so many countries' histories, and... everything. It feels like everything. There is so much packed into this book. And he says this was a project he took on for fun. Istg.

Even being so science-heavy, the characters were so well rounded and explored that is rare to see in a book of this scope.

Truly, my bones to pick with this book are minimal. Someone please talk to me about the seven passions.

You can always trust Wells to write diverse and well-rounded characters, and to explore the ramifications of magic in her fantasy worlds. This one's got a genuinely kick-ass middle aged woman at its center, who also gets a love interest, but(!) the romance doesn't feel forced and doesn't distract from the story.

Unfortunately, I mixed up some characters who became integral to the end plot, which meant the end didn't strike with full force. Can't be sure whether that was my lack of attention or, potentially, the characters weren't introduced or well-defined, causing them to become interchangeable in my mind.

I would have benefited from a demonstration, of exactly what could go wrong if the Rite to remake the world went astray, perhaps in a vision. To just trust that the Rite always has to go exactly right, and that it does in fact remake the world, felt a stretch too far to have to believe. I especially didn't get a sense why a 100-year anniversary would be higher stakes than the annual ones, if they're both doing the same thing. I would have loved to see how the Wheel was discovered in the first place, and how the Rites came to be. (How, exactly, does a society learn that they have to remake the world every year?)

I was surprised that this was a standalone though -- it felt like it had more love to give for the world and its characters. Regardless, a solid read.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an epub copy of the book in exchange for a review.

Hey, John. You made me cry about paint. I hope you’re happy. (Seriously though, good job.)

It’d be one thing if I’d only cried once while reading this book of reviews, which ranges in topics from Diet Doctor Pepper to velociraptors. If it’d just been the once, I probably wouldn’t have mentioned it. But it wasn’t just once. (It was like, probably three times, and a fighting back of at least a fourth time. Not about the Doctor Pepper or velociraptors, though.)

Having read all but one of Green’s books over the years, it’s tempting to claim that any of his books is going to do its best to make you cry. But that’s a rather reductive way of putting it. What he’s really doing, which he’s said in his “On Writing” video, is that he’s “trying to understand and speak from [his] deepest self to the deepest self of someone else.” What a great approach to have. My tears, to me, are a mark of success.

And, you know, I think I recognize him in a version of me from a decade ago.

At the tail end of high school, before dropping us into the Great Unknown of post-secondary, our philosophy teacher had us present our ten favourite aesthetics of all time. I was already leaps and bounds more anxious back then than I am today, but generally considered myself competent at public speaking. For some reason though, my voice shook and cracked as I tried to share ten of my biggest joys. (Androgyny, harmonies, and stars, to name a few. Even the Minecraft End Poem, which would still make that list today.)

This fumble of a presentation ended with an awkward silence as I shuffled back to my seat. No one had any questions. I think my classmates were trying to spare me from complete humiliation by pretending they hadn’t noticed. Our teacher asked us to reflect on some of our favourite presentations, and I believe he threw me a small mercy when he mentioned mine. He said, “You know, I think Icarus managed to cram in more than just ten in theirs.”

John Green has likewise crammed his reviews chalk full of his favourite stuff wherever possible. There are handfuls of heart-stopping quotes by poets, which I absolutely had to copy down for my own collection, especially concerning sunsets. And like me retreating back to my desk, Green was scared too. He wrote pieces of this book during the start of the pandemic, which is quickly evident. In the very first essay, he says, “Horror and suffering abound in every direction, and I want writing to be a break from it. Still, it makes its way in – like light through window blinds, like floodwater through shut doors.” And in that fear, I recognize more than one version of myself.

So, yes. This book made me cry multiple times. Throughout, Green is levelly vulnerable, speaking from his deepest self. This is a book about how humans have changed the world, the ways in which we occupy it, the merits of fundamentally flawed traditions, and asks us where we go from here. This last part, of course, is for you to dwell on, and ultimately to live out yourself. We are an active participant in the world, and would do well to remember this.

I give The Anthropocene: Reviewed by John Green four stars.

This is a lot to fit into one book, but I'm not sure it should have been more than one book either.

Mostly, I wish there was more description to ground us in the world. We move so quickly from plot point to plot point (especially at the end) that I would have liked to sit more firmly in the moments we do experience. Instead, I think the result was a bit too "floaty" -- it almost felt like we could have had Snow end up in any kind of scene or setting, with almost equal (ie lack of) weight. But I realize more description would pad an already high page count.

It's been a long time since I've read the other books, but I think that's generally just Collins' style -- both moving the plot quickly and the lack of description, which ultimately do work well enough for a YA audience.

One of Collins' strengths that I enjoy is revealing plot points that feel unexpected but inevitable. What's difficult, I think, in writing any prequel, is that we know the fate of the main character. Because we know we see Snow again, I would have liked the emotional arc of /why/ he is how he is to feel more compelling. Snow is a deeply flawed character, and we're absolutely meant to understand him as such, but ultimately I didn't have any big moments of remorse for him -- just a resigned loss at those around him. Looking back, there was a great, slow moral deterioration of choices, though.

This sounds like I mostly have negative things to say, but this is a solid book, and I have a ton of respect for Collins to return to writing this series because the public (or mostly the media?) Didn't Get The Message, and because she has more to say about our own world.

Every day that goes on, I am reminded more and more of this book.

If I could have everyone read just two books, they would be Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Feed by M.T. Anderson.

No clue why this took me forever to get through. But I strongly suspect that despite Rice's solid writing, I just don't like reading Lestat's perspective.

Glück reminds me of Hamlet, in that she is never completely transparent with us. The rawness is held at arm's length.

But goddamn do some of these poems strike particularly well for where I'm at in life right now.

Best read in spring.