The Martian

The Martian is a good book. The payback is worth it for whatever time you choose to invest in the book. Depending on your tastes and interests, you could be flipping through the pages, believing in the numbers thrown at you, or be meticulously googling, reconfirming and learning about every bit of factoid you stumble upon. However, it's not a great book. It falls short in language, presentation and subtlety.

The language and presentation has a cheerful naïveté to it – it's endearing in the beginning, And since the protagonist Mark Watney is introduced as a cheerful quirky guy, the tone suits the log-pages he writes. However, it quickly grows tiresome and hollow; and once you get to the point where NASA top brass are talking like high-school hipsters, you realize that the almost-stupid jive belongs to the author himself rather than the protagonist. I found strange sense of humor, the pop-culture references, one-line-quips (some of them coming out of the mouths of middle-aged executive men in highly inappropriate scenarios), and 70's-culture-bashing, all equally terrible.

The language and presentation are rather blunt. There are hardly any sentence that you'll want to read a second time for its beauty; no line or phrase that will stay with you days even after you put the book down. Similarly, the author attempts to streak the storyline with a few emotional threads (family-relations, conversations among crew members etc.), but most of them are underdeveloped, and fall flat on their faces.

However, The Martian isn't about exquisite language or subtle emotional sketches. The Martian is about the survival story of an estranged man caught alone on Mars. It's about the sheer joy of survival stories, and about the tiniest details of how a resourceful guy could fight an impossibly hostile environment. It's a good book, and is a must-read if you're the kind that waits for every update XKCD What-If comic. It's a worthy read if space even remotely fascinates you, or if you love books interspersed with factoids and trivia. I liked the book as a whole, but there are many things about it that I hate.