The Martian by Andy WeirMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Publication Date: February 2014
Source: Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review
Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first men to walk on the surface of Mars. Now, he's sure he'll be the first man to die there.
It started with the dust storm that holed his suit and nearly killed him, and that forced his crew to leave him behind, sure he was already dead. Now he's stranded millions of miles from the nearest human being, with no way to even signal Earth that he's alive--and even if he could get word out, his food would be gone years before a rescue mission could arrive. Chances are, though, he won't have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old "human error" are much more likely to get him first.
But Mark isn't ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills--and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit--he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. But will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?
So, I went out to my mailbox, which is white. The atmosphere was oxygen, which allowed me to breathe, science science, boring science. I grabbed this book I had received for review. The weight was approximately 1.2 pounds. I couldn't tell the dimensions, but I will say about 7 by 9 inches, because that sounds pretty boring. By the way, science, science, sciencey science. Then I read the book, turning a page each time I had read all the words on the page. There were 300-400 words on each page. You don't really care about that, but I'm telling you anyway. When I finished the book, I closed it, and had never been so happy to be done with a book!
If the style of the above paragraph interests you, you'll probably enjoy The Martian quite a bit. At least half of it was super dry, and super boring. I didn't really care about every minute detail of main character's existence.
There were some saving graces to the novel, though. I liked it a lot better when it wasn't Mark Watney's diary, and was just a regular story with dialogue and more than one person. I'm not the type of person who likes movies like Castaway, or that one with the guy in the coffin for the whole movie. So maybe I'm just not a good candidate for this one.
I'm kind of baffled by how high this is rated on Goodreads, but I'm obviously the odd one out here, and most people will like this. If you don't, however, like to read a diary in the form of a science textbook, or enjoy the previously mentioned movies, you might want to skip this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment