The year started only 3 days ago, but I can say that I’ve already read my first book. It is “Devoradores de Estrelas”, the Brazilian Portuguese version of Andy Weir’s “Project Hail Mary”. And my story with this particular book is very interesting.

Having read the other two books by Weir so far (The Martian and Artemis), I recommended “Project Hail Mary” to my father some months ago, as he was looking for something new to read — even without having read it myself by then, because I knew, from the content of Weir’s other books that he couldn’t go wrong.

When we met during Christmas he brought the book about during a conversation. He’d read it and liked it very much, so much so that he was reading it for the second time that same week. This really surprised me because he’s not a person of rereading many books (as me myself am not). So that got me curious… to the point that on December 29 last year I (finally) decided to start reading it myself.

“Project Hail Mary” tells us the story of Ryland Grace, an astronaut who needs to find a way to save the Earth from destruction on his own, as he is the only survivor of a desperate emergency mission — if he fails, all of humanity will be destroyed. But when the story begins, he can’t even remember his own name, much less his mission or how to fulfill it. He just knows that he slept for a long, long time, and that now he’s millions of kilometers from home.

Being someone who reads a lot, I know that it’s normal for authors to have their ups and downs, I mean, not every book written is going to be amazing. “Artemis”, which came after “The Martian”, caused me a meh feeling, not because it was bad, but because its predecessor set the level high up. And this made me expect a lot from “Project Hail Mary” as well — and even more after my father told me he’d enjoyed it so much to cause him to read it twice.

And I was amazed at how fast I could read this book. Only 5 days! It’s a page turner, I have to say and repeat it. When I was an English teacher I taught my students about the word unputdownable, exactly for situations when you come across something like “Project Hail Mary”. One could say, oh, this book’s gonna be boring because it’s just a lonely astronaut out there, but no! It’s amazing, and I can’t recommend it enough.