The book was funnier and also about 10x more fascinating from a scientific perspective. What were montages in the movie were excellent and detailed explanations in the book.

And there’s also a few extra twists and turns in the book not in the movie.

Not sure if it fits your criteria but I once read a book where a teen foster child has surgery and then wakes up midway through and the doctors are stunned because he has mechanical parts.

After some running away from government agents and a love interest who gets killed he faces off with this particular agent. Gets the best of this agent and then cuts his own body open so the agent can see the part. He then says something like "you want to know what I am so badly, well take one last look because you will never know and it will drive you mad" Wound heals (he also healed quickly) and buggers off never to be seen again. The book then ends.

We didn't kill your girlfriend, Protagonist why did you have to do that to us.

It's a mystery chase novel. The chase was OK but chases aren't why I read a book and the mystery is never revealed.

I now realise that I can't remember the title and that's going to bug me for the rest of the day.

expected to like: Ficciones and The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges. I can't relate to the curiosity without obsession, but obsessive anyway approach. Didn't expect to not like abstract concepts and themes.
expected to dislike: Love in the Time of Cholera. Now I understand it.

Thank you for expanding my knowledge!

I remember googling for almost every monster and they were all from Polish folklore and Polish tales and mythology. But it could be that I really just googled few :)

I read the book after watching the movie (I didn’t like the movie that much, however. I’m not a big Matt Damon fan) and I was surprised by how funny and clever the book was. I ended up giving it 5 stars and it was in my top 5 of last year when I read it even though I already knew what happened.

Project Hail Mary is on my list for this year. 🤞🏻

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I've read the book, listened to an audio book version and watched the movie. The book is 100% worth the read, and you'll get some stuff that was cut out of the movie.

IMO the book is better than the movie. Though Matt Damon nailed it as Mark Watney

The silent patient really had the potential to be a great one - so many setups.. And it came to nothing!

you should check out www.netflix.com they have some good stuff that might be up your alley if Ducks didn't work for you.

Thought I was going to love The Master and Margarita. I found it a lot duller than advertised. Could be the translation (although it's by far the one I've seen most recommended), but the prose just lacked any kind of panache imo.

Yes third this - and the book is better than the movie - i did not like the movie that much they change bits. Project Hail Mary is fab

i've read so many books and yet the martian has always been my favorite. Loved the movie but would honestly say that the book is even better. funny, witty, and the science is top notch.

Yes. There's laugh out loud moments from the book that didn't make it into the movie.

Of course. Literary genres and tropes are more fluid and arbitrary than most people realise.

For example, I have started reading Japanese fantasy light novels a few years ago and the subgenres in it are completely different from western fantasy : the biggest one is for example the isekai genre, which is a mix of reincarnated / summoned to another world stories and litRPG stories. You also have quite a few book series of Chinese court drama with a fantasy bent, and also book series about interacting with yokai, the supernatural creatures of Japanese folklore. It is very different from the mix of epic fantasy and urban fantasy we associate with the fantasy genre in the West.

So I would not be surprised if new genres and subgenres were to suddenly appear in the West as well. It is enough to have one well-written book doing something new that suddenly becomes popular, and then you will have a bunch of other books imitating it, and then you get a new subgenre. This is what originally happened with the Lord of the Rings : most fantasy books before it was published were Sword and Sorcery, but epic fantasy then became the dominant subgenre in fantasy after the publication of the Lord of the Rings, even though that subgenre did not exist at all before.

It is at least marginally better.

The recent developments in AI are going to open up possibilities for Borgesian complexity in the idea of "authorship". It'll be so much more difficult to tell where human creativity comes into a literary work that authors will play all sorts of games with mechanization.

And thought sequences too

Genres are just words we use to describe a common style of book, movie, game, etc.

New genres pop up all the time and they will forever for this reason, because of the combinatorial complexity of possible narrative and setting elements.

The LITRPG has been surging for a while now, soon we'll be getting LLM-Romace or similar with the ChatGPT craze.

I'll second this. Especially if you're worried about repeating the same story with the Martian, go with Project Hail Mary. It's more ambitious, still as well-executed, and easily as funny.

Yes, read the book. And then read Project Hail Mary.

As long as you don't go over to where they live.

Pretty much every Jack Reacher novel. The schtick is getting old. I think I'm done with the books.

Both are good. You will not be disappointed.

Yes, I would recommend it. I did the same thing that you did and watched the movie first, however, I read the book and discovered a lot more to be amazed by in the book. I got to use the imagery from the movie to help me conceptualize what was occurring in the book.