Patrick

Gave up. Cool body horror tropes aren't a great excuse for Stephen King-esque crudeness, nor for the amount of animal cruelty in here.

I'm the biggest hater.

If you're the kind of person who rolled their eyes in the Martian movie trailer when Matt Damon said "I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this", you're in a for a bad time with this book.

It gets even more cringey, with choices like:

Yay! More oxygen!

[...] designed to work against technical faults, not deliberate sabotage (bwa ha ha!)

Fear my botany powers!

Yeah, that's right Mars, I'm gonna piss and shit on you. That's what you get for trying to kill me all the time.

"Kilowatt-hours per sol" is a pain in the ass to say. I'm going to invent a new scientific unit name. One kilowatt-hour per sol is... it can be anything...um... I suck at this... I'll call it a "pirate-ninja"

Mark Watney is absolutely insufferable as a character, and only described through execution of snark, not the heavy mental load of an astronaut stranded on a foreign planet. They should have left this guy on Mars.

There are maybe... three or four times where the actual emotional state of Mark is discussed. There's a tantrum, a couple mentions of "fear" and "uncertainty" and ... that's it. The rest is numerical facts (not calculations, just numbers and units) for "scientific credibility", I guess.

Fortunately, the supporting cast of characters, that is, everyone not on Mars, are more reasonable and don't seek to fill every moment with jokes.

Reading this after reading the real-life log entries of Arctic and Antarctic exploration in the form of Endurance or Empire of Ice and Stone was such a shock to the system - those log entries show the hardened consummate professional sailor, much like The Martian, trapped in a hostile, uncaring alien land, facing starvation, and the tone could not be more different. I know they are intended for different audiences but The Martian loses that element of immersion from having an unbelievable character contrasted to the logs of similar non-fiction counterparts.

I think this is exactly what people think of when they criticize self-help books - small concepts that anyone could reach with the most minimal of research, and, in some cases, outright fabrication of fact. Rather than do the research, those same individuals turn to the SparkNotes of Psychology - it's a shame this one is so highly rated.

There are nuggets of inspiration, sure, but you could probably get the same effect from reading about Stephen King's work ethic or watching an art reel on YouTube.

The basis of tying everything to human procrastination and willpower isn't a new idea, and the format that this is written in makes me think I'm reading a message board where someone suddenly thought they found out that the secret to hustling is just to work harder. No kidding.

Good enough it made me log into goodreads. Couldn't put it down.
Really good info on the history and current fight for public land. I could have skipped some of the travelogue, but still excellent overall.

A very well-done ending ultimately hampered by too much build-up during the main plot, fairly disjointed names, geography, and history, and plotlines that I was excited about being concluded in a poor way (Danica's grandfather)

I kept feeling like I should be enjoying the book more than I was. The characters (especially the Khalif) were great, but their motivations were lacking for me Because of the lack of enjoyment I was getting from reading it, it took me months to actually finish it. Ultimately I found it to be boring until the end.