THE MARTIAN.

THE MARTIAN by ANDY WEIR.

INNER FRONT COVER BLURB: I’m stranded on Mars.

I have no way to communicate with Earth.

I’m in a Habitat designed to last 31 days.

If the Oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the Water Reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death.

So yeah. I’m screwed.

FIRST SENTENCE {Chapter 2: Log Entry: Sol 7}: Okay, I've had a good night's sleep, and things don't seem as hopeless as they did yesterday. 

(Please excuse me for not sharing the first sentence of chapter 1 with you but I choose not to share expletives here. TT)

MEMORABLE MOMENT {Page 148}: They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially "colonized" it. So technically I colonized Mars.

SOURCE: A library book read read for the Arkansas Book Club of which I'm an international member (Read Kelly's account of the meeting here, her thoughts on the book here). Sadly I was unable to get hold of the book in time for the meeting but still decided to read/review it.

MY THOUGHTS: I hate to use the word bored but alas its the only word that adequately sums up my thoughts on what I thought was one of the dullest books I've read in a long, long time. 

The author's tendency to run and run and run with an idea incredibly tedious. 

The repetitiveness of 'the martian', main protagonist, Mark Watney's 

• finding a problem, 
• worrying about his imminent death - and my goodness, with so many sentences (especially in the early chapters) beginning with a certain four lettered profanity followed by 'I'm dying' (or words to that effect) I quickly found myself praying for his demise 
• only, after much mathematical calculation and chemical periodic tables, to find a solution (one which funnily enough often seemed to involve duct tape as as we are informed 'turns out even NASA can't improve on duct tape') 

almost more than I could endure.

Altogether badly written, I don't know if it was only this edition (published in 2011 by Del Rey) but I found myself quite surprised by the number of typing errors etc. And that's to say nothing of the repetitive use of language - for goodness sake the author didn't even vary in his choice of swear words.

Character wise. 

I'm always impressed with authors that rely on one character (and lets face it though there are other characters The Martian is largely reliant on, well, 'the martian') and manage to do it well but I'm afraid for me Andy Weir didn't quite pull Mark Watney (or indeed any of the secondary characters) off. His failure to even attempt to channel any real human emotions into Mark disappointing to say the least.