When astronaut Mark Watney is presumed dead and left behind on a space mission to Mars, he has to survive by himself on an uninhabited and inhospitable planet until he can be rescued.
I recently watched The Martian on Amazon, and I was reminded of how much I like the movie and the story. So, I decided to reread the book to see how it held up and to see how different the book was from the movie. I first read the book back around when the movie came out in either 2015 or 2016, and I really liked it. I remember thinking there was a lot of science that just completely went over my head. I also remember thinking that Mark used a lot of duct tape.
I had forgotten that the first 50 pages of the book, and in fact, a lot of the book, are made up of Mark Watney’s journal entries. The movie does a great job of translating the journal entries into visual effects by having Mark record his entries as a video diary but honestly, sometimes these were super boring to read. Again, there’s just so much science that I did not understand or care about. I don’t care to read about how to grow potatoes or how to make water from hydrogen and oxygen. I definitely skimmed those parts.
I felt like the book got better once NASA figured out he was still alive, and we got to read about scenes from the space center. Like all books that are turned into movies, the book had much more detail and many more scenes that were not in the movie. But I was surprised at how much dialogue was taken word-for-word from the book. I guess I just wasn’t expecting the movie to be so faithful to the original material.
I went back and read my original review for this book, and I think I have the same opinion now as I did then – the book was very entertaining, but I was out of my depth with the science stuff. I do wish that the book had more of an epilogue. The movie’s epilogue is satisfying but I think I wanted more.
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