The Martian by Andy Weir
It was surprisingly poorly written. I think it suffered from too much hype, rather than terrible writing. The story was relatively interesting, but it’s just a castaway plot-line.
The main character Mark Watney is rather unpleasant, although not obviously meant to be. No-one is a standout interesting character, the disasters are a bit too rote and on time. “I’ve been reading 5 minutes, time for another thing to go wrong.” And the writing was really just not very good.
It could have done with a good editor and a couple of revisions in my opinion. I also did not enjoy the weird POV shifts and changes in narrative, why do a weird shift when Watney suddenly actually reaches the MDV? Why not just have him… log it? Like he logged most everything else.
It wasn’t even like NASA could have seen it, as they would have just been receiving photos. That kind of shift happened a couple of times and was very disruptive.
All in all, kinda meh. ★★★☆☆