Two Very Different Kinds of Wonder: Project Hail Mary vs. Theo of Golden
I spent time at the beach during our recent summer vacation with two books: Project Hail Mary and Theo of Golden. Jen and I swapped books after finishing our first choice. They couldn’t be more different in style, but actually have a common throughline that you might not expect. Here’s how they stack up.
The premise. Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary drops you into a mystery: a man wakes up alone on a spaceship with amnesia, and the story rebuilds itself (and him) one discovery at a time. It’s propulsive, funny, and relentlessly plotted — every chapter earns the next. Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden does almost the opposite. An elderly Portuguese stranger arrives in a small Southern town and starts buying pencil portraits from a coffee shop wall, quietly returning each one to the person it depicts. There’s a mystery here too — who is Theo, really? — but it unspools at porch-swing pace, not thriller pace.
The engine. Weir’s book runs on competence and problem-solving: science as a language of hope, ingenuity as the answer to isolation. Levi’s runs on attention and generosity: the act of seeing people fully as the thing that actually changes them. One is about surviving alone through cleverness; the other is about a stranger who refuses to let anyone stay unseen.
The tone. Project Hail Mary is buoyant even in crisis — there’s real stakes-of-the-species tension, but it’s balanced by humor and an almost buddy-comedy warmth (Grace and Rocky’s friendship is great). Theo of Golden is gentler and more melancholic underneath its warmth — it’s carrying grief the whole way through, and you feel it build even while the town around Theo is being quietly transformed.
What they share. Both books, for all their differences, land on the same note: connection is the point (as Rocky would say, “Life is Reason”). Weir gets there through a rescue mission and an unlikely friendship across species; Levi gets there through 92 portraits and a man determined to give anonymously before he’s known. Different vehicles, same destination — and both stuck with me well past the last page.
Up next: A Gentleman in Moscow. Trading spaceships and small Southern towns for a count under house arrest in the Metropol Hotel — looking forward to seeing where confinement and attention take me this time1.
I use AI tools (including Claude) to help draft and organize ideas for some posts. Everything published here is reviewed, edited, and approved by me before it goes out.