‘You probably think
losing a crewman is the worst thing that can happen. Not true. Losing the whole
crew is worse. You kept that from happening.
But there’s something more important we
need to discuss: What is it with you and disco? I can understand the ‘70s TV
because everyone loves hairy people with huge collars. But disco?
Disco!?’
A friend of mine told me to read this book, so… I did. If
you haven’t familiarised yourself with the main idea after all the media
coverage the movie adaptation from last year caused, it’s about a guy, Mark
Watney, who gets stranded on Mars and tries to get back to Earth. It sounds
like a pretty daunting task of course, but if anyone can do it, I’d most
definitely put my money on him. He’s optimistic – the book states that his
pleasant personality was part of the reason why he was on the mission to begin
with –, a botanist and a fix-it-all sort of a person. It’s pretty perfect.
I often hear people say that the plot is something like
this: Mark does a thing. Thing goes wrong. He fixes thing. He does another
thing, and so on. I’m not going to claim that this isn’t true, but I don’t
think it fully captures just how gripping the book is, how you really do feel
Mark’s agony when he almost dies over and over again.
The story is mostly told through his sol logs, with witty
commentary on the day’s events (I spent a long time deciding on a quote because I liked so many things!!) and things dumbed down just enough but not
assuming that the reader is stupid by any means. I mostly identify first person
POV with annoying YA main characters, but I’m fully convinced that this book is
what it was made for. Even though he’s stranded on a strange planet all alone,
he doesn’t complain any more than necessary. He doesn’t give up even when
everything seems hopeless, and he does all of this very believably.
Speaking of believable; I don’t know all that much about
Mars (personal shortcoming, I am aware), but at the very least this book felt
very real, and I know Andy Weir did a fair amount of research to make it as
accurate as possible, using existing technology and all that. Still, it doesn’t
feel too detailed, to the point where you just have to doubt whether this can
actually be true. All in all, he did a really good job with what he wanted to
accomplish.
The other characters got a surprising amount of personality
as well, considering how they were portrayed, just doing their own thing and
kind of trying to help out where they could. If this makes any sense, I'd sum up that The Martian is a feel-good survival
science fiction book. I was genuinely touched by how much complete strangers
cared and how they wanted to get Mark home, fuzzy feelings and all that.
I don’t think I have anything bad to say about this book, and I really did try to figure something out. It
was just really really good, to be honest. It was very geeky and I still read
it because it was just so interesting. If anything, the ending left me a bit
cold but it was the only single way the book could have possibly ended. Maybe I
was just that sad to let it go. I'll definitely read whatever else Andy Weir has written. Did you know that he put the book on Kindle due to high demand, and at the lowest possible price? And that it became a Kindle bestseller after that? This little information makes me really happy.
Be seeing you, probably with Matthew Quick’s Sorta Like a Rock Star – I finished it
yesterday but I’m still deciding whether I want to give it three or four stars. Hope
you’ll have a great day ‘till then!
PS. My boyfriend told me that I can’t review a book without
a Starbucks picture so you’re stuck with these now, sorry not sorry.
PS. That’s my name btw; Iiris is a character from a book I
love, if you’ve for some reason been faithfully following these things.
