Here's the thing: The Martian isn't a bad book. The premise is original and creative. There are some great moments. However, the poor execution outweighs the good parts. 
 The Good: 
 1. Again, the premise is great. Survival stories have a lot going for them in terms of theme and character motivation, and this one is no different. Weir does a great job of touching some of those emotions. 
 2. There were some funny sections. I can see why people really enjoyed the humor of the book. Watney is a humorous character. Why I thought the humor was problematic will be touched on in a little bit. 
 3. He definitely scienced the shit out of this. A HUGE level of research had to have gone into this to make everything seem so plausible. I can't say how accurate any of it is, but he had me convinced. He also does a great job of simplifying everything into layman's terms for those of us who aren't skilled in math and science. This could have easily turned into a boring read trying to explain how everything works but it avoided that problem very well. 
 The Bad: 
 1. The organization is a structural nightmare. This is where it became apparent this was a self-published work. There were random third person narrations from Watney, not nearly enough narration from the rest of the Hermes crew, and characters that appeared for one chapter who seemed to hold some importance and then would disappear for the rest of the book. (Rich Purnell, anyone? Where the hell did he go?). This would have been so much stronger if it had been better organized. I could follow the story, but I was constantly annoyed. 
 2. Weir is much better at technical explanations than he is at writing human interactions. All the characters fit into the same mold: sassy and sarcastic. The only exception was Tim, and even his appearances were brief and monotonically sarcastic. There were also a lot of sections that would have benefited from a editor's hand; lines that would have been cut, and the text would have been so much better for those cuts. 
 3. So much of the humor was forced. Paragraphs would be included just to set up one specific joke in a very obvious way. That worked for a lot of readers, but that does not work for me. I don't like forced humor. I like my humor naturally built into the characters. That structure doesn't work when all of your characters are the same. 
 Watney is meant to be the childish, sassy protagonist. Most of the time, his jokes were overboard. "Good job, Rover. Here's a Scooby Snack." It's just too much. Weir is trying too hard to make Watney the funny guy, and it falls flat. I can only take so many sentences like "Yay!" and "Someone needs to talk to Commander Lewis about her seventies problem" before I get irritated reading Watney's sections. 
 4. The ending was too neat. The major problem was resolved, but I wanted to see a conclusion for the other characters that have been forced into the narration. Weir put importance on them throughout the narrative but never gives them their due at the end. One last chapter would have solved that problem. Instead, we just get to hear how much Watney stinks and how it's the best day of his life. Not satisfying enough. 
 Overall, I probably won't read this again, and I probably won't recommend it to anyone. But I'm SUPER excited for the movie. I think it will smooth out a lot of the problems I have with the book.