I loved this book! By page 10, I was hooked. It turned out to be a very different book than I anticipated ... I imagined it would be a harrowing survival story. And it was, don't get me wrong, but I had no idea there would be so much humor and life in it as well! I was on the edge of my seat until the very last pages. 
 Mark Watney might be one of my all time favorite literary characters now. I was sold from the moment he said that he wished he could be his D&D druid and just cast create water, I have to admit. I know some reviews have said that his humor or nerd-talk is off-putting, but it's up to the reader to see between the lines. At one point, almost as a throwaway line, one of the NASA psychiatrists mentions that Watney uses humor as a defense mechanism. With that in mind, you realize that based on the amount of joking around he's doing ... he must be terrified. And rightfully so! That realization helped me connect with the emotional heart of this story. 
 There's definitely a lot of science talk in the book, but it does a good job of walking the fine line between providing detail for the more science-minded reader, while providing basic explanation for those of us whose chemistry classes are far behind us. Did I grasp every single concept or technology discussed? No, but I got the gist of it, enough to understand what Watney was doing, or why he was doing it, even if I didn't totally understand how. 
 And finally, this book made me realize that if I'm ever in a survival situation on Mars, I'm most assuredly going to die. O.o