Matcha Book Reviews

After the recent hype over Project Hail Mary (which totally deserves it, go read the book if you haven't, or watch the movie if that's more up your speed, it's amazing!) I also decided to rewatch The Martian.

I watched it when it first came out, but it never pinged my radar as something super cool, you know? Maybe it's because I am not a huge Matt Damon fan (sorry!), maybe it's because I wasn't in the mood, maybe it was something else, who knows. But some friends and I decided to watch it again, and it was better than I remembered, so I figured I might give the book a chance too.

If you go into this book expecting to get the same level of energy as Project Hail Mary - don't. While somewhat similar on the surface (both characters somewhat awkward scientists, stuck in space, all by themselves, trying to solve a problem to survive), the tone of this book is very different. The Martian is about people coming together even when planets apart, not about aliens or fun adventures in space. Even if there is a lot of science in both stories.

To give a bit of a disclaimer here, I am not a very sciency person. I like space stuff as much as anyone, and having complicated systems (usually magic ones) is not new to me, but the science in The Martian felt a bit...boring. I don't know enough about it to tell if it's accurate, but in general, that side of the book was a bit of a let-down, since it was a lot of talk about various chemical reactions and physics and that sort of things that flew above my head and took me out of my book enjoying zone a bit. I get that using the science to survive is the main plot of the story, so I will fully embrace that it was just not for me. Good news is, if you are into that sort of thing, there was A Lot of science.

The other theme of the book is people and relationship between them, as well as what humanity can do to achieve its goals. If you ever listened to any, the book really reminded me of the NASA podcasts (shoutout to Houston We Have A Podcast - if you are interested in space, give it a try! It's very cool while not being super hard to follow) and the way a lot of NASA staff and astronauts talk about the work they do. Sure, it's a job, but you can see the passion behind what they do. And Andy Weir managed to very accurately reflect this passion in this story - the way people come together, the hours they put in to make sure everything is going to work, the nerve wracking wait to see if what you poured into your soul will work, the cooperation between countries. This is what takes the Martian from being sciency ramblings about surviving on Mars and making it a story worth reading.

I don't often read non-fantasy non-sci-fi books, but I was in a mood for something that is a bit more slice-of-life like and this booked seemed like it's pretty popular, so I decided to give it a try.

While at first the book seems deceptively simple, just a collection of letters an old woman is writing to her friends and family, talking about her day-to-day life, you can't help but feel charmed by her. She seems like someone you might know -- your grandma, neighbour, or someone you expect yourself to become in a couple of years (or decades).

Her story is not the most sensational, nor it is filled with adventures, and that's what makes her so much more real. There is love, and there is grief, and there is trying to find your path between the two without losing yourself or the connections you built.

With the book spanning multiple years, we can see the relationships between characters grow, change, get destroyed and rebuilt. And in the core of those relationships we can see ourselves and our lives, like a mirror reflecting happenings in the book onto us and making us rethink events that are long forgotten.

Paper letters written by hand and sent by post, which at first seem like a quirk of an older person who never quite got used to technology, also quickly become a reminder on how fast-paced everything is in our lives. Sending an email, or a text, or a voice message, which takes us seconds and can be deleted with a press of a button or a lost with a forgotten password to the account are the exact opposite to the art of letter writing. It's a reminder that forging connections, and leaving something behind on earth before we are gone are not a given, but something we should work on. After all, once it's uploaded to the internet, nothing is ever truly gone, but also would anyone ever care to look for it?