The next Bellevue Rotary Book Group discussion will be October 28, from 7:00‑9:00PM. Thank you to Chris Loeffler for arranging the meeting location: Concur conference room, 601 108th Ave NE, Bellevue.

The book is “The Martian,” by Andy Weir (387 pages), voted by past Rotary Book Club Chair Bill Ptacek as the “best book of 2014,” and now a movie starring Matt Damon.

If you have an odd birth year please bring a bottle of wine to share. Also, it would be good if a few people could bring simple finger food to go with the wine. More details will be provided later on the conference room location and parking.

If you (your partner) plan on participating, please RSVP to Margaret Doman.

From Booklist

Remember “Man Plus,” Frederik Pohl’s award-winning 1976 novel about a cyborg astronaut who’s sent, alone, to Mars? Imagine, instead, that the astronaut was just a regular guy, part of a team sent to the red planet, and that, through a series of tragic events, he’s left behind, stranded and facing certain death. That’s the premise of this gripping and (given its subject matter) startlingly plausible novel. The story is told mostly through the log entries of astronaut Mark Watney, chronicling his efforts to survive: making the prefab habitat livable and finding a way to grow food, make water, and get himself off the planet. Interspersed among the log entries are sections told from the point of view of the NASA specialists, back on Earth, who discover that Watney is not dead (as everyone assumed) and scramble together a rescue plan. There are some inevitable similarities between the book and the 1964 movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars, but where the movie was a broad sci-fi adventure, the novel is a tightly constructed and completely believable story of a man’s ingenuity and strength in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Riveting. — David Pitt