The Martian

I liked it! It was sciency and entertaining. And that cover...I want a print of the cover to put on my wall. Just gorgeous.

I feel like my review is just going to be responses to other people's reviews. I understand why the negative reviewers don't like this book - there is a particular writing style that you either like or don't like. And, I'm not going to say that Andy Weir is a good writer...I don't really think he is. A lot of this book is Mark's log, which is blog-style...anyone can have a blog. All of his other characters sound the same though. They all have what I assume is Weir's sense of humour and timing. Some reviewers have blamed this on the fact that Weir can't interact with people, or using it as evidence that he's on the autism spectrum somewhere? I find this pretty ridiculous. I feel like I'm pretty high-functioning in my level of social interaction, but all the conversations I've written have been stilted and terrible. Because I'm a bad writer. I don't know whether or not Weir has autism, I'm just saying that the fact that he can't write people having conversations is not proof.

Something else that has come up in other people's reviews is that Mark's style of writing doesn't make sense because he's a NASA scientist and astronaut. Because people with that much education don't say “lol” or make jokes about pirate-ninjas. Because...who knows? Because getting lots of education in science makes you immune to internet memes? Because working for a space agency makes you irreparably professional? Remember that a scientist with the European Space Agency wore a shirt for a televised interview that had half-naked women holding guns on it. Which, regardless of whether or not you think it's sexist (it kind of is though), is decidedly not professional. So obviously you can like or not like the writing style, you can think it's embarrassing and unprofessional, but to say that it makes the book unbelievable because an astronaut could never talk like that is not very realistic. Personally, I would like more people in STEM fields to talk like “normal” people...I think that part of the reason that it's hard to get minority groups into STEM and especially professions like ASTRONAUT or ROCKET SCIENTIST is because people in those professions are assumed to have been abnormally smart for their whole lives. If average people don't feel like they could have a conversation with a rocket scientist, they won't feel like they could be one.

So anyway I liked it. Recommended!