Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir [brief]

A guy goes to space [and some other stuff after a spoiler break]

Weir kinda fascinates me: he's incredibly succesful, after self-publishing his debut The Martian (that became a famous movie), and he clearly has a certain something that makes people love his fiction.

He is also unbelievably bad at some of the core cornerstones of fiction: his characterisation is awful, his jokes are not funny, he repeats the jokes multiple times. I'm not quite sure what the name for this is but the texture of the prose felt weird — he would often digress in weird ways and insert paragraphs that didn't seem relevant for no obvious reason.

One of my poetry teachers in college said that our student-y efforts were at times better than professional poems, but that professional poems were always smoother – that is, in order to get published your work has to be consistent, even if the peaks are lower.

In this sense, Weir feels like an amateur: there are many charming and interesting qualities to his work, and I enjoy his books far more than I would some alternative book that was more polished but let interesting. His peaks are high, and I give him credit for it. But the lows are also just hilariously low, and I can't get over how little that seems to matter.