Andy Weir has a total hit on his hands with his very first book that has been turned into a movie. The Martian has been out for a little while now, so it’s not news in the sense that it’s, well, new. But this is a book worth reading by pretty much everybody. Sure, the language is definitely PG-13. I mean that in a very literal sense. Waiting for my 13 year old to come out of middle school I hear the kids using the language that is rife throughout the book echoed by her classmates. Trust me, it’s not the kind of language that we use at Hectic Manor (well, as long as you don’t count the hammer incident last weekend), but it’s part of the storyline.

Language aside, it’s a riveting book. Without creating any spoilers, the protagonist, Mark Watney is stranded on Mars when the rest of his crew leaves in a rush. Since Mars isn’t just around the corner, the future looks bleak unless he can work some miracles. Dumb stuff, like water and food, stand in his way of surviving until somebody figures out he’s alive and then figures out a way to rescue him before he starves or dehydrates.

This is a quick read, despite being 435 pages long. Colleen (my 13 year old 7th grader) got the book during a recent road trip. She started reading it, and it was taking a while. So I challenged her to finish the book before I finished 600+ pages of business books. Our race to the finish came down to the very last night, each reading like our lives depended on it. She managed to finish just before I did…and she won a trip to the bookstore to buy two new books. In my opinion, it was a win-win situation. Most especially because I could finally lay my hands on The Martian and begin reading it. You see, I vastly prefer to read the book before watching the movie…and I’ve wanted to see the movie since it was released in theaters on October 2nd, 2015. So at 8pm I got my hands on the book. I finally forced myself to stop at page 100 the first night so I’d get a good night’s sleep. After 120 the second night and nearly 200 the third night, I decided to just finish it up. So in three nights I completed the book. Not quite up to my cover-to-cover reading of the Harry Potter books, but pretty rapid compared to the other books I’ve been reading lately.

So I give The Martian a lot of points for being a fast read. It loses a few for the language, but not many. I also give it a ton of points for being exciting. There are twists and turns, and while you know that good things will happen, then bad things will happen…each one was a surprise unto itself. While reading the book, I felt the the characters were real, and Mr. Weird does an exceptional job of illustrating the environment. Enough that almost nothing in the movie surprised me. Well, the sheer beauty and starkness of the simulated Martian environment did surprise me…but that’s partly because my imagination wasn’t quite ready for that amount of stark beauty.

I finished the book last Friday, and we immediately got the movie from Redbox. Within three hours of completing the book I was sitting there watching the movie. And I was discussing the few differences between the book and movie with two of my teens who had read the book. That was actually really fun. Trust me, the differences are subtle between the book and movie, and where they movie strays it does so with good reason. Let’s face it, movies are visual media, as such they can convey things in a single shot that might take pages upon pages to explain. Likewise, books weave a tale that sometimes simply doesn’t translate well to celluloid. In this case, the book translated wonderfully and the differences were so well-done. Frankly, I have no complaints!

So I would highly recommend that you go get the book and read it right away. Then watch the movie.

When you’re done, pop back over here and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear what other people think of The Martian.