The Cephalopod Coffee House - The Martian

Hello and welcome to another edition of the Cephalopod Coffeehouse! The idea is simple: on the last Friday of each month, post about the best book you've finished over the past month while visiting other bloggers doing the same.  In this way, we'll all have the opportunity to share our thoughts with other enthusiastic readers.

This time, I actually have a book to tell you about:

The book starts with this ominous sentence:

"I'm pretty much fucked."

Ordinarily, I wouldn't advise starting your book with an F-bomb, but in this case it works and works beautifully, because Mark Watney, our intrepid narrator, is that kind of guy. A wise-ass to the core, incredibly geeky smart (he's a botonist AND an engineer), and he's just been left for dead on Mars. He's going to need his sense of humor.

Honestly? I give this five stars, which I almost never do. I ripped through this book in a matter of days,  completely engrossed in Mark Watney's effort to survive and his hilarious commentary on his plight:

"Remember those old math questions you had in Algebra class? Where water is entering a container at a certain rate and leaving at a different rate and you need to figure out when it'll be empty? Well, that concept is critical to the 'Mark Watney doesn't die' project I'm working on."

So far this is my favorite book of the year. Now we'll see if anything else can top it...

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This review was brought to you thanks to the Cephalopod Coffee House. Click the pic to see who else participated!