Oof, I definitely don't have the attention span for that! I think the longest book I've finished was the ~2000 page(?) longer edition of "The Stand". And that was back in high school. "Project Hail Mary" was probably a ~6-8hr read over the course of a week. 🤣

Yeah, I really enjoyed The Martian as well. Weir is such an oddball writer in terms of his skill set. Aside from excelling at building his plots and solutions around real or plausible-enough science, his strengths as a writer are... meh? But the end results so far (his 2nd book, "Artemis" is the weakest of the three, but also enjoyable enough) are still overall pretty great. It's just so weird to read a book and have 20% of my brain note, "Yeah, he's not an amazing writer" while the other 80% is thoroughly enjoying it.

Ug, my AP Lit teacher and all my UCLA profs are crying out right now that I can't even write the book's actual title correctly: It's "Project Hail Mary".

Protagonist from roughly our-ish time frame wakes up with no memory. On a spaceship. Nearly at the end of a trip to another star (like, wut, he knows we don't have the tech for that). He slowly recalls that our sun is inexplicably dimming which will basically end life on Earth in a matter of decades. But why the heck is he way outside of our solar system and how tf is that even possible? Obv dude has to figure out what his mission was and somehow save our sun.

I actually read an entire book! First time in YEARS! Pretty sad, considering that once upon a time I completed UCLA's entire undergrad Literature curriculum. Or way back in high school in AP English Lit we tore through a novel a week! 👀🤯 The last book I finished might've been The Bitcoin Standard or Popper's "Digital Gold". Focusing on nonfiction and narrowing to mostly just bitcoin books is likely a huge part of my nonexistent reading pace. Aside from being fiction, I wonder if "Hail Mary" being told in the first person also helped combat my bad attention span. Third person: you're being told what's happening. First person, you're inside someone's thoughts and part of your brain receives it as if it was happening to you ("Ouch, that hurt!" vs "he burned his finger"). --- Quick review: "Hail Mary" is pretty engaging (good job starting *in medias res*) with chapter length tailored to short attention spans (🙋‍♂️). Never gets to "omg I can't put this down" intensity but obv kept me hooked enough to enjoy coming back to it each day. As is usual with Andy Weir, real-world science is baked into the story's bones. Though as it gets more speculative, it can seem a bit disappointingly simplistic. Something like the movie "Arrival" spends all of its focus on solving ONE really complex problem, but Weir's protagonist too easily overcomes what should be a number of near-impossible barriers. I forgot that Weir is just never as funny as he thinks he is, or perhaps more favorably: his characters have a pretty lame, predictable 4-out-of-10 sense of humor. His protagonists also never talk or think like a normal person and the "it's 'cause I'm a super science nerd" excuse can only take him so far. But the story is well told, pretty cool and interesting from a sci-fi perspective, moves fast, and never gets boring. The protagonist isn't as annoying as I'm making him sound and he gets a lot more accessible (and even funny!) after his disorienting beginning. Critiquer gotta critique, but I really enjoyed it. Recommended for sci-fi nerds who can ease up a bit and take in a nerdy-but-not-super-nerdy story.