The Martian

This is an incredible book. Simply said.

You'd think a book told mostly from the point of view of a single, completely isolated character would be boring, but you'd be very VERY wrong. All it really takes is the very first chapter for you to instantly fall in love with Mark Watney. His personality just smacks you in the face the moment you start reading his recorded personal logs of his life while stranded on Mars, alone, after suffering an assumed fatal injury while his team were forced to make a quick exit from their stay on the red planet in our not-so-distant future.

It's an amazing story of survival and ingenuity; of the brightest minds on the planet Earth banding together to save a single human life 12 light-minutes from home. The surprising aspect of this book is how funny it is! Watney's day-to-day survival logs are injected with humorous one-liners such as, “Why can Aquaman control whales? They're mammals!”.

There's enough twists and turns that you honestly won't know if there's a happy ending, or if Watney's fate is to be memorialized as something humans just can't overcome yet. This unknown keeps you engrossed right up until the last few pages. The ending is satisfying, but deserves an epilogue that sadly doesn't exist yet.

I am not a fan of space stories. Books, TV, movies...space is rarely my cup of tea for entertainment. Firefly the TV show, and now “The Martian” are such exceptions to the rule that I think everyone needs to experience them as well.

If that's not enough to sway you, the audiobook (which I usually listen to for all books I'm reading while in my car. Thanks WhisperSync for Kindle!) is top-notch!