The Martian

by Andy Weir

You've probably heard of this one. Astronaut gets stranded on Mars and has to figure out survival completely alone in a hostile environment, for over a year while he hopes for rescue. He does manage to make contact with Earth eventually, so knows when he might get rescued- and the food will run out long before it's possible. So he rigs stuff up, activates soil, reclaims more water, grows potatoes. Has lots of equipment failures or simple mistakes that throw things awry, sometimes to the point of disaster it looks like- but he always manages to squeak past death and survive another day. I thought I would enjoy this just as much, if not more, than the movie version- which I saw quite a while ago- because a lot of the science is explained here (and it's based on a lot of research, reputedly very true-to-life what that kind of situation would be like) but unfortunately the explanations mostly either went over my head or were boring, so I found I didn't get more out of it. The film was more gripping, I followed along better seeing the suspenseful moments, whereas this book doesn't really convey a lot of emotion. You hardly get to know the main character as a person. It's all about the problems he's tackling. There is some humor thrown in there- but honestly I didn't find it funny, just tiresome. Being a gardener, I was pretty interested in how he got a potato farm going on Mars to feed himself, but even that lacked the kind of description I enjoy. When the story moved on I still wanted to see how it all played out (having forgotten a lot of key points) but turns out it was fairly dull and I didn't get a sense of tension in the end, I was just turning pages to be done. So this is another case where I actually preferred the movie. That's all.

However, lots of other readers enjoyed it- see the links below.

Rating: 2/5           435 pages, 2011

more opinions:
Indextrious Reader
BookNAround
Attack of the Books!
That's What She Read
Bookalicious Babe