A fun read, though perhaps I just happen to fall into the geeky demographic the book is aimed at. I am impressed by the many ways the author dreamed up to make his protagonist suffer to the point of dying, along with the clever ways he had Watney extricate himself from each setback. It doesn't read as a cinematic treatment at all, with all the raw details of the technology (worked out by Weir using computer simulations he wrote) set out on the page, the number of potatoes the man had to keep from starving, the path of the ground loop that nearly destroyed his chances for coming home, facts and figures that might make another reader's eyes glaze over but which seemed to cement the realism for me. So if it's true that Hollywood is putting together a blockbuster project filming this, you might want to read the original if you enjoy that kind of stuff because they're bound to strip all of it out.