The Martian by Andy Weir
The teaser or not-quite-theatrical trailer or whatever two minute clip Fox released for the upcoming movie The Martian some months back did absolutely nothing for me. Even with Ridley Scott's name attached — you saw Prometheus — I found it strange that a huge budget studio film set in space was coming out so close to the release of Interstellar, another big space movie, let alone one that also starred Matt Damon (spoiler..). Now that I think about it, if you include Gravity, space movies have had quite the run these last few years. Anyway this trailer did nothing for me. He gets stuck. They save him. So what? Also, Donald Glover? I like Matt Damon, but he's had some misses recently. I disregarded it until someone at work mentioned reading the book and I read about the unbelievable response to the book online. This book is absolutely thrilling. While I do read a lot, I admittedly don't read much modern fiction. Astronaut Watney is accidentally left behind on Mars when his crew thinks he's dead. He has to survive. It's hard to survive in space. Things go wrong. When things start to go right, they go wrong again. And then they go wrong again. Even when you know things are going to go wrong, they go right and then go wrong in a way you could not have imagined. The science of it was fun for me (and apparently accurate at least to an extent). I do recommend this very much.
I just re-watched the trailer and am a lot more excited at least until I realized Venkat Kapoor, the head of NASA in the book, turned into fucking Jeff Daniels on the screen. Jeff fucking Daniels are you kidding me? An Indian dude was finally going to major part in a movie and it went to this clown.
No Country for Black Men by Byron Crawford
I've read all Byron Crawford's books. His blog is in my RSS reader. I subscribe to his weekly newsletter. If you're familiar with his writing, you can guess how this book reads. The books' titles would suggest that they have themes, but they're all anthologies of sorts, with chapters that document different current (and not so current) events that may or may not have to do with their titles, not unlike some of his long form blog posts. There were maybe three chapters about how Nas had in fact lost in Nas Lost if I remember correctly, but that could be total BS. No Country for Black Men follows suit of the other four (wow), but I really enjoyed certain parts of this book. It would be weird to say he has improved while writing these books because he's been writing for so long, but he definitely hit a stride writing certain chapters of this one.
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