A Book I've Loved Lately — Project Hail Mary

This review is hard to write, and the reason is kind of funny: the best things about this book are exactly the things I’m not allowed to tell you.

Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary (in Taiwan it’s translated as 《極限返航》). The magic of the novel lives in the process of “figuring out what’s happening at the same time as the main character.” Because we, just like the protagonist — Grace — don’t know where we are, why we’re here, or what we’re about to face; we fill in the picture as we read. So the moment I say one sentence too many, those “ohhh, so that’s it” moments get stolen right out from under you.

(It actually lines up with the K-drama I’m hooked on right now, 《My Royal Nemesis / 멋진 신세계》. When the female lead arrives in the new world, she also has no idea who she is, yet she’s loaded with all kinds of skills and knowledge and can get straight to work — which is so much fun, and exactly like our protagonist here, who wakes up somewhere with no clue how he got there.)

Anyway, the part I most want to share is precisely the part I can’t say. This is probably the most self-contradictory recommendation I’ve ever written.

Because — same as me — when the novel got adapted into a film, I only bolted to the cinema after I one day saw fellow knitters overseas start talking about the wolf-head cardigan, and about the crocheted molten-lava Earth that Ryan Gosling uses to mess around with his students in class.

Okay — I can’t talk about the plot, but I can at least share what it did to me.

Lately I’ve been exploring some new fields and new work on a bunch of fronts — the AI PM side of things — and it just hasn’t been going smoothly. Honestly, it’s exhausting. What’s tiring is that feeling of no bottom in sight: you solve one today, three more show up tomorrow, and nobody can just tell you whether your answer is right. I’ve noticed that at night I have zero appetite for the “first-principles thinking” or “Antifragile” kind of books — can’t read a single word. What I actually needed was this one.

Because the core of this book, boiled down, is two things: competence, and company.

It hands the protagonist a problem that’s absurdly hard, unreasonably huge, and then lets you watch him get through it — not with luck, not with cheat codes, but by breaking the problem apart, testing a hypothesis, failing, testing another, inching forward.

He miscalculates, he gets stuck, he takes the long way around, but he never lets go of that “let me think about this” stance — which honestly isn’t that different from how we build products (see? work stress is so high it loops right back here). Reading it, I kept feeling steadied, like someone beside me was saying: yeah, the problem really is this hard, it’s okay, we’ll go one square at a time, and if we get it wrong, well, worst case we just… drift off toward a boundless open sea.

I love looking for answers, maybe too much. My therapist pointed this out to me a while ago — that I get anxious about “losing to other people,” because ever since I was little I loved those games of who can find the answer first. So when reality is a situation I can’t answer yet, with no one to answer it alongside me, I feel especially hollow, and I seize up — when the truth is I don’t actually need anyone to push me; I just love doing this stuff.

This book somehow filled that emptiness back in. It didn’t tell me “you’ll succeed.” It made me fall back in love with the act of solving itself.

After charging into the cinema knowing nothing, I cried quite a bit. The editing heightens that early, knowing-nothing absurdity, and adds a few extra layers at the end. Later my book club picked this book, and that’s when I found out the novel is its own kind of detail-obsessive — my favorite “long-winded literature” style, where more detail brings more feeling.

I really love the kind of people who, when you casually ask “how would you measure the mass of the Earth?”, just tilt their head and quietly cobble together a few assumptions and a solution.

No wonder I was bad at physics — I just brute-force memorized everything.

Anyway, too much detail would ruin the reading experience, so this is where I have to stop too.

If you’re also working through a problem with no bottom in sight — work, life, whatever it is — I really recommend this book. Don’t look up the plot, don’t read reviews, don’t even study the back cover too closely. Just open to the first page and, together with someone who knows nothing, figure it out.

I took the movie tie-in cover off, too — so good-looking. Who doesn’t love a hot nerd.