Emm's Digital Library

When I was around 18 and first picked up the novel, Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir, I wasn’t expecting for it to throw me into a cultural community. I decided to read it for an action-packed sci-fi escape from the real world, but didn’t expect for it to mean something more than that. I passed it on for my mom to read, and she ended up absolutely loving it. Because it turned into something that we shared between us, the book itself just meant that much more.

Growing up, I was usually used to reading on my own, whether that be in my bedroom late at night with only a flashlight to see the words, or in between breaks during class in middle school. Books were always some sort of private escape from the world for me. But when I handed my mom that book to read, suddenly a whole new world was opened up. A shared universe between us. When reading alone, you can feel the tension of themes within novels, but the themes become much more real when you see how other people view them. My mom and I would go back and forth for ages, talking about parts of the novel that made us laugh or cry. Sometimes even falling into deeper conversations about resilience or friendship. Constantly asking each other if we’d gotten to ‘that one part’ yet. This one book gave us a shared language to talk about so many things with each other, that we might not have in the same way if we didn’t have this experience.

That’s what I enjoy so much about being a part of a reading community. The way that the stories spill off of the page and seep into the lives of the readers through community. A big theme within Project Hail Mary is the idea of survival through connection, not just through science, and I think that beautifully represents the ways connection flourishes in our own lives. We survive and find meaning in shared stories and by leaning on each other. I feel like that coincides with the cultural rhetorics conversation we’ve been having; stories as ways of making meaning and not just telling it. That’s what Project Hail Mary did for me and my mom, becoming more than just a book but something that connected us in a different way. Whenever I think about the book now, it’s not about the plot substance, but about the ways that my mother and I got to connect, whether through sending each other memes about it or the small conversations over breakfast, we weren’t alone while doing it.