Becky's Reviews > The Martian

If I ever get stranded on Mars, I'm fucked. Though, I guess I could say the same if I were to run off the road in a snowstorm, or lock my keys in the house or something. What I'm getting at here is that I am not a problem-solver who will be able to find a way to survive a crisis. If the coffee-maker stops working, and sarcasm and/or crying doesn't fix it, we might as well call in FEMA & the Red Cross, because there's a damn emergency here.

I absolutely loved this book. It's everything that I look for in a man, err... book: smart, funny, exciting, and kept me up half the night. Rawr!

I almost put off reading this book because I had recently read Caliban's War and unless I'm reading a series back-to-back, I like to mix up my genres. Keep things fresh, you know? But then the book I'd decided to read as a buffer was "Commageddon", to use a friend's term, and so I went to Mars.

And I am so glad that I did. I hit the last page of this book and kinda wanted to turn right around and re-read it. There's so much awesome in this book that I kinda want to quote all of it, which I won't do, but man, it's tempting. There are SO MANY Watney-isms that had me giggling ridiculously.

Teddy swiveled his chair and looked out the window to the sky beyond. Night was edging in. "What must it be like?" he pondered. "He's stuck out there. The thinks he's totally alone and that we all gave up on him. What kind of effect does that have on a man's psychology?"
He turned back to Venkat. "I wonder what he's thinking right now."

[Watney's] Log Entry: SOL 61: How come Aquaman can control whales? They're mammals! Makes no sense.

That one had me giggling for while. It was just a moment of perfectly paced, unexpected absurdity that is about as subtle as a tire-iron to the face, but the abrupt shift works. It's a nice little moment of levity to break up the tension, and also, hell yeah! I wondered that myself!

There was a lot of crassness and snark in this book, and it worked for me. Watney is a character I love to love. He walks the line between "Fuck You" and "Yes, Sir" quite well, and I love his lack of shit-giving for the "niceties" whenever he can get away with it. And this appealed to me. I'm a grown woman with a 4th grader's appreciation of crude language, poop jokes, and dry, sarcastic wit. I don't apologize for this. I embrace it. YOLO, bitches!!

The science and math were way over my head, but it didn't FEEL way over my head because Watney is such an every-guy kind of guy that even when he's calculating gigglebots to power the atmosphere-a-majigger I don't feel like I'm sitting in on a physics lecture. He makes it relateable, even though I'm not sure that many of the terms he used are technically correct. I've heard of a pirate-ninja, so not that one, but "joule"?? Come on. It's "jool". *sigh* Jeez, Watney. Read a book or something.

Anyway, I could go on squeeing and slobbering love all over this book, but I won't. I'll just say that I loved it, and that if Andy Weir and I ever cross paths, he better watch his legs because I might could be tempted to give one of them a teensy little leg-hump in appreciation. ;)

PS. Andy Weir, if you're reading this... Write more novels. :D