Project Hail Mary

 Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, 478 pages.

This wonderful novel has already been written about by Kara (here) and Christa (here), so feel free to look there for a plot summary and more thoughts. This was my first Andy Weir novel, and it wasn't quite what I had expected. For starters, even after hearing about how fun and accessible The Martian is for years (it's still on my list, but this book cut in line) but I don't know that I had ever really grasped how accessible and fun it would be until I read one of his books myself. Also, this book is much smaller scale and more personal than I had realized. I had seen this book described as a "first contact novel" which isn't inaccurate, but did have me picturing sort of grand scale explorations of alien civilizations. What it is instead is an intimate portrait of two different creatures meeting despite astronomical odds. 

Which is all to say that I ended up much more emotionally invested in this novel than I ever expected to. I had to work myself up to starting this book because I was expecting "hard sci-fi" to be a bit dense and hard to get through, even if it was very good. However, I never got that feeling reading this book. Instead I found the science interesting (and when it was too difficult for me to understand I found it was easy to gloss over it and still understand the story) and the plot kept me reading way too late at night. It was a beautiful experience that really got to me emotionally, and the pacing was very nearly perfect. I would definitely recommend this book to pretty much anyone, even those who aren't normally interested in Science Fiction.