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Boozy Book Club Book Review: The Martian by Andy Weir

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This month’s Boozy Book Club pick was The Martian by Andy Weir, in anticipation of the movie adaption starring Matt Damon that comes out this Friday. I saw the trailer for this movie before I knew it was based on a book, and even though I love Matt Damon, did not have much interest in seeing it. I think space is interesting, but have no desire to ever leave earth. The idea of being stranded on Mars is terrifying to me, and I don’t particularly like terrifying movies. This is why I never saw Gravity.

All this to say, I went into this book with few expectations. Then I read the first line…

I’m pretty much fucked.”

…and decided to give it a second chance. And as it would turn out, I ended up really liking this book.

A few things to note:

1. I have an engineering degree. Two actually, a bachelors and masters. They are in civil engineering, not mechanical or aerospace, but I still took a Thermodynamics class in college, as well as a lot of physics and chemistry.
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2. There is a lot of science and math in this book. I probably used more of my engineering degree reading this book than I do in my every day job.
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3. The ability to at least be able to somewhat follow the math, and know what words like “entropy” mean probably helped me to enjoy this book.
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So…what did I like about this book besides the opportunity to use knowledge that I gained 10 years ago and haven’t thought about since?

Mark Watney.

If you don’t like Mark Watney, you’re not going to like this book, because it’s pretty much just you and him throughout the majority of it. And if you think about it, as readers, we don’t really even know Mark Watney. We know very little outside of his life on Mars. We know he has 2 parents in Chicago, and that he’s single, but really that’s about it. Other than that, we only know the Mark Watney who is stranded on Mars by himself for a very long time. The humor and honesty in how he deals with the situation is what made him most endearing to me. I don’t think I’m being too spoilery when I say that things continually do not go as planned for Mark.

life sucks source

But for a story about someone who is always having to come up with a way to survive, I didn’t expect to laugh out loud as much as I did.

Math

The other thing I really loved about this book was the math. Besides the fact that the book assumes that the radiation on Mars is something that has been magically figured out whenever this takes place, the book walks you through exactly how Mark plans to survive. How he plans to generate water on a planet that was thought to have none. That is, before this week when Nasa announced that evidence suggests there is water!

I love that the author doesn’t just gloss over the details of how Watney will separate hydrogen from his fuel source and add it to oxygen, but he does the conversions of how much hydrogen and oxygen will be required to make a specific number of liters of water. I know not everyone cares about the details, but for those of us who enjoy details and science and math, it was really fun to read a book that doesn’t gloss over those things. Needless to say, I’ve been recommending this book to my coworkers since before I even finished it.

My Review
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I give The Martian 4 wine bottles. While I wouldn’t recommend drinking wine while you read it, if you are at all mathematically and scientifically inclined, you will enjoy this book. And if you aren’t, I think you might enjoy the movie a bit more. They’ll have a hard time diving into all the details in 2 hours, so you should get more of the action and humor without all the math.

So…what did you think? Did you love it or was it too much math? Did you appreciate Mark’s humor?

Read The Martian by Andy Weir

Also…if you read our optional book, Uprooted by Naomi Novik, this month, make sure to join Beth for a Twitter read along tonight at 8 pm EST.

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