I have to confess, I chose this last book during my end-of-the-year reading frenzy when I was looking for books that I could read fairly quickly. I've had it for just over two months I think, and it absolutely has to go back to the library today (no more renewals), so I figured I better read it and write it up. If anyone cares, I re-read the small portion of it that I read last year, so as to have read the whole thing in 2012. I did this not so much out of a sense of honor as out of a sense of senility.
Book 04 - So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams
As the book covers so wittily notes, this is "The fourth in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy," which started with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and now encompasses six books I believe, the last of which was not even written by Douglas Adams. The first three books deal with the adventures of Arthur Dent, who with the help of his friend Ford Prefect, escapes the imminent destruction of earth by a Vogon demolition crew that is clearing the way for an intergalactic highway, and winds up hitchhiking across the gallaxy with the aforementioned guidebook to help him along.
Now after eight years, Arthur Dent is back on earth, with nothing to show from his travels except an old towel, a shopping bag from a galactic duty-free store, and a Babelfish in his ear. Wait. Did you say Earth?? Wasn't it destroyed? Well, this is just as confusing to Arthur as it is to the reader. He saw it happen, didn't he? His first hitched ride was on one of the Vogon demolition ships!
Well apparently the earth was not destroyed, but something big happened. The official explanation was that it was mass hallucinations due to the accidental release of an experimental psychotropic drug. It's old news now. People don't really talk about it that much any more. Heck, they don't even talk about the disappearance of the dolphins that much, either.
Wait. Did you say the dolphins are gone?? Where did they go? Arthur can't help but look for answers, especially after receiving the mysteriously magnificent fish bowl with "So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish" engraved into its side. Fortunately, he finds a soulmate in Fenchurch, an odd but beautiful girl who is also looking for answers, the difference being that she doesn't even really know the questions. Together, they seek out Wonko the Sane, who knows more about the dolphins and their disappearance than anyone. They learn that God's Final Message is located on a distant planet, and with the help of Ford Prefect, once again Arthur hitches across the galaxy with Fenchurch in tow, looking for this great piece of cosmic wisdom.
I read the first three books many years and many brain cells ago, so my recollection of them is not perfect, but I remember them as much funnier than this. For one thing, with Earth as the setting most of this book, there does not seem to be as much opportunity for new zaniness, and so many of the things that were so funny from the books - the Babelfish, the improbability drive, Marvin the depressed robot - are either missing, mentioned in passing, or simply seem played out. Don't get me wrong. There are still some very funny parts in this book. The humor has a Monty Python style to it, which is not surprising, as Adams has connections to the British Comedy troop. Adams has written at least one sketch for Python, and he has had cameos in others. Also, Terry Jones wrote Starship Titanic based on one of Adams' ideas. If you haven't read any of Adams' work, though, you are much better off starting with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Book 03 - Shutter Island - Dennis Lehane
Another week, another book finished on time. I seem to be making a habit of this. No preamble today, just straight to the review.
Book 03 - Shutter Island - Dennis Lehane
Rachel Solano is missing. She has disappeared from a locked room in a locked building in a high security Federal facility for the criminally insane, on a island off the coast of Massachusetts. In order to escape, she would have had to get through multiple locked doors, past multiple guards, and then somehow make it off the island and cross an icy expanse of water to make it to the mainland. It's like she evaporated into thin air.
It is the mid-1950s and Teddy Daniels is a U.S. Federal Marshal sent to help recover the missing inmate. Teddy, a highly decorated soldier in World War II, has not been the same since his wife died in a fire a few years back. He drinks too much, and clings too hard to the memory of his late wife. She invades his dreams, and he frequently converses with her in his mind.
Together with his new partner Chuck, they venture to the island, and are met with lies and stonewalling. They are unable to interview the woman's primary psychiatrist, as he has been allowed to leave the island on a planned vacation. There is a bit too much alignment in the stories told by the staff of the facility, like they have been coached as to what to say. To add to the mystery, a strange coded message has seemingly been left behind by Rachel.
Ted and Chuck explore the island looking for clues to explain what is going on. After a brush with the beginnings of an impending hurricane that is bearing down on the island, they return to discover that Rachel has miraculously been found, although there is still no good explanation as to how she came to be missing in the first place.
Ted's encounter with Rachel precipitates a brutal migraine attack, and after that things continue to go poorly for Teddy. His already tenuous grip on reality is starting to slip. When he does sleep, he is plagued by intensely nightmarish dreams. Several encounters he has with people on the island start to feed the seeds of paranoia, and Ted starts to wonder who he can trust. He continues on though, not so much because he wants to solve the mystery of Rachel, but for an ulterior motive that brought him to the island in the first place. Learning the truth about this motivation threatens to undo the remaining portion of his sanity. But is he really going crazy, or is this part of a plot by the doctors to protect the highly experimental and morally questionable work that seems to be going on in the lighthouse and the mysterious Ward C? And just who *is* Patient 67?
I was a bit disappointed when I started reading this, as it wasn't anywhere near the scary psychological thriller I'd hoped it would be. Even when the action picks up, it still let me down a bit. The prose is a bit mainstream and didn't hold me in suspense like I would have hoped. I'm not saying it was a bad read. It's a decent pop mystery novel that's perfect for summertime beach reading.
But it's cold outside, and I'm stuck inside, and I'm looking for a little more.
Book 03 - Shutter Island - Dennis Lehane
Rachel Solano is missing. She has disappeared from a locked room in a locked building in a high security Federal facility for the criminally insane, on a island off the coast of Massachusetts. In order to escape, she would have had to get through multiple locked doors, past multiple guards, and then somehow make it off the island and cross an icy expanse of water to make it to the mainland. It's like she evaporated into thin air.
It is the mid-1950s and Teddy Daniels is a U.S. Federal Marshal sent to help recover the missing inmate. Teddy, a highly decorated soldier in World War II, has not been the same since his wife died in a fire a few years back. He drinks too much, and clings too hard to the memory of his late wife. She invades his dreams, and he frequently converses with her in his mind.
Together with his new partner Chuck, they venture to the island, and are met with lies and stonewalling. They are unable to interview the woman's primary psychiatrist, as he has been allowed to leave the island on a planned vacation. There is a bit too much alignment in the stories told by the staff of the facility, like they have been coached as to what to say. To add to the mystery, a strange coded message has seemingly been left behind by Rachel.
Ted and Chuck explore the island looking for clues to explain what is going on. After a brush with the beginnings of an impending hurricane that is bearing down on the island, they return to discover that Rachel has miraculously been found, although there is still no good explanation as to how she came to be missing in the first place.
Ted's encounter with Rachel precipitates a brutal migraine attack, and after that things continue to go poorly for Teddy. His already tenuous grip on reality is starting to slip. When he does sleep, he is plagued by intensely nightmarish dreams. Several encounters he has with people on the island start to feed the seeds of paranoia, and Ted starts to wonder who he can trust. He continues on though, not so much because he wants to solve the mystery of Rachel, but for an ulterior motive that brought him to the island in the first place. Learning the truth about this motivation threatens to undo the remaining portion of his sanity. But is he really going crazy, or is this part of a plot by the doctors to protect the highly experimental and morally questionable work that seems to be going on in the lighthouse and the mysterious Ward C? And just who *is* Patient 67?
I was a bit disappointed when I started reading this, as it wasn't anywhere near the scary psychological thriller I'd hoped it would be. Even when the action picks up, it still let me down a bit. The prose is a bit mainstream and didn't hold me in suspense like I would have hoped. I'm not saying it was a bad read. It's a decent pop mystery novel that's perfect for summertime beach reading.
But it's cold outside, and I'm stuck inside, and I'm looking for a little more.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Book 02 - The Rum Diary - Hunter S. Thompson
Well, it's week two, and I'm posting again on time! Last week the link closed early (unless Robin is in England), but I posted my review by 9PM EST on Saturday night, so in my book that counts as on time. Not that it really matters that much to me. I've said on numerous occasions that I'm not so worried about the individual weekly deadlines, just the overall 52 book goal. However, given my poor showing last year, and the frantic rush to successfully finish the year before, maybe I should pay a little more attention to the weekly goal.
The release of the movie, The Rum Diary, last October got me to thinking about Hunter S. Thompson. It's been a long time since I read anything of his (25 years??), so long that I considered rereading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Although there have been a couple books on the challenge that I started in the past and never finished, so far I haven't completely reread any books, and those that were incomplete I have always restarted from the beginning. I needed something by Thompson that I hadn't yet read, so I settled on The Rum Diary itself. Unfortunately, due to the movie being out, I had to sit on the waiting list at the library for a while in order to get a copy, so I'm just now getting around to reading it. I haven't yet seen the movie, but I loved Johnny Depp's treatment of Thompson in the movie version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Although published in 1998, this book was originally written in the 1960s and is apparently Thompson's second book, with one other as-yet-to-be published book preceding it. Thompson, known for his prolific drug use and his Gonzo journalishm style, is probably most famous for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, as well as his writing for the Rolling Stone magazine. His book covers and articles are often accompanied by the nightmarishly surreal art of Ralph Steadman (here's a link to some of Steadman's work), and it is said the character of "Duke" in the Garry Trudeau comic strip Doonesbury is modeled after Hunter S. Thompson.
Book 02 - The Rum Diary - Hunter S. Thompson
The novel takes place in Puerto Rico in the late 1950s. Kemp is a journalist who has hopped around from job-to-job, working in various places in Europe and most recently in New York, when he receives an offer to work at the San Juan Daily News, an English language newspaper on the island. Upon his arrival, he learns of the shaky financial status of the publication, but stays anyway. He befriends a photographer named Sala, who shows him to the local watering hole. Al's serves cheap booze and hamburgers, and tends to be a hangout for the Daily News employees. Kemp also becomes drinking buddies with Yeamon, a rather coarse and unstable reporter who lives with his girlfriend Chenault, who turns out to be a girl that Kemp fell madly in lust with on the plane trip down.
Kemp becomes aquainted with Sanderson, an extremely well connected man who started out working at the paper, but now runs a PR firm on the island. Sanderson has his hands in everything, and starts to feed Kemp freelance work, which takes some of the edge off his worries that the newspaper will fold. So much so that Kemp feels settled enough to get a car and a place of his own (for a while, he was staying with Sala). However, this feeling of complacency makes him worry about feeling older and selling out.
Meanwhile, the newspaper is a cesspool of laziness, alcoholism and other forms of moral decay. The reporters show up drunk, drink while they are working, and drink when they get off. There was so much alcohol consumption going on that I thought I was in a Hemingway novel. And like Hemingway, there is the question of whether alcohol is the cause or the symptom of a greater problem: that of being lost in life.
Eventually the drinking takes on tragic consequences. We learn that Yeamon frequently beats Chenault when he gets drunk. Yeamon's instability under the influence leads to his dismissal from the newspaper, and shortly thereafter to Kemp, Sala, and Yeamon being savagely beaten by locals and local police and thrown into jail. Chenault turns out to be just as volatile when drunk, and a trip to Carnival in St. Thomas again turns violently ugly when both she and Yeamon act out. Finally, the financial troubles of the newspaper combine with the drunken mental instability of the employees (including Yeamon) to ratchet the tragedy up to a whole new level.
For an early effort, this novel is surprisingly good. Thompson has a fluid writing style that keeps things moving along, and because this is only the 50s, his depiction of drug abuse seems to be limited to alcohol. The book tends to mirror its characters, though. It does not move forward much. There is no great redemption. Although Kemp learns things about himself over the course of the story, it is unclear in the end as to whether any of these lessons stick. It is not even clear as to whether he took what seemed to be the immediate path in front of him. All-in-all though, I'd say it's a pretty good read.
The release of the movie, The Rum Diary, last October got me to thinking about Hunter S. Thompson. It's been a long time since I read anything of his (25 years??), so long that I considered rereading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Although there have been a couple books on the challenge that I started in the past and never finished, so far I haven't completely reread any books, and those that were incomplete I have always restarted from the beginning. I needed something by Thompson that I hadn't yet read, so I settled on The Rum Diary itself. Unfortunately, due to the movie being out, I had to sit on the waiting list at the library for a while in order to get a copy, so I'm just now getting around to reading it. I haven't yet seen the movie, but I loved Johnny Depp's treatment of Thompson in the movie version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Although published in 1998, this book was originally written in the 1960s and is apparently Thompson's second book, with one other as-yet-to-be published book preceding it. Thompson, known for his prolific drug use and his Gonzo journalishm style, is probably most famous for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, as well as his writing for the Rolling Stone magazine. His book covers and articles are often accompanied by the nightmarishly surreal art of Ralph Steadman (here's a link to some of Steadman's work), and it is said the character of "Duke" in the Garry Trudeau comic strip Doonesbury is modeled after Hunter S. Thompson.
Book 02 - The Rum Diary - Hunter S. Thompson
The novel takes place in Puerto Rico in the late 1950s. Kemp is a journalist who has hopped around from job-to-job, working in various places in Europe and most recently in New York, when he receives an offer to work at the San Juan Daily News, an English language newspaper on the island. Upon his arrival, he learns of the shaky financial status of the publication, but stays anyway. He befriends a photographer named Sala, who shows him to the local watering hole. Al's serves cheap booze and hamburgers, and tends to be a hangout for the Daily News employees. Kemp also becomes drinking buddies with Yeamon, a rather coarse and unstable reporter who lives with his girlfriend Chenault, who turns out to be a girl that Kemp fell madly in lust with on the plane trip down.
Kemp becomes aquainted with Sanderson, an extremely well connected man who started out working at the paper, but now runs a PR firm on the island. Sanderson has his hands in everything, and starts to feed Kemp freelance work, which takes some of the edge off his worries that the newspaper will fold. So much so that Kemp feels settled enough to get a car and a place of his own (for a while, he was staying with Sala). However, this feeling of complacency makes him worry about feeling older and selling out.
Meanwhile, the newspaper is a cesspool of laziness, alcoholism and other forms of moral decay. The reporters show up drunk, drink while they are working, and drink when they get off. There was so much alcohol consumption going on that I thought I was in a Hemingway novel. And like Hemingway, there is the question of whether alcohol is the cause or the symptom of a greater problem: that of being lost in life.
Eventually the drinking takes on tragic consequences. We learn that Yeamon frequently beats Chenault when he gets drunk. Yeamon's instability under the influence leads to his dismissal from the newspaper, and shortly thereafter to Kemp, Sala, and Yeamon being savagely beaten by locals and local police and thrown into jail. Chenault turns out to be just as volatile when drunk, and a trip to Carnival in St. Thomas again turns violently ugly when both she and Yeamon act out. Finally, the financial troubles of the newspaper combine with the drunken mental instability of the employees (including Yeamon) to ratchet the tragedy up to a whole new level.
For an early effort, this novel is surprisingly good. Thompson has a fluid writing style that keeps things moving along, and because this is only the 50s, his depiction of drug abuse seems to be limited to alcohol. The book tends to mirror its characters, though. It does not move forward much. There is no great redemption. Although Kemp learns things about himself over the course of the story, it is unclear in the end as to whether any of these lessons stick. It is not even clear as to whether he took what seemed to be the immediate path in front of him. All-in-all though, I'd say it's a pretty good read.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Book 01 - Life of Pi - Yann Martel
A rather lengthy preamble this time. If you want to just read the review, you can skip down to "Book 01."
No sense dwelling in the past. I had a miserable showing last year. I read nineteen books, twenty really - but I never bothered to review Tom Brokaw's The Time of our Lives, even though I finished it weeks ago. For a while there I was frantically trying to finish books in a futile attempt to make a decent showing, but eventually I just decided to fall back, regroup and try again for 2012.
I think part of the problem I had with Brokaw's book was that I didn't buy into the premise that reporting on the news for many years qualified you to identify solutions for what ails us as a nation. I don't think it disqualifies you either - I think it's just a separate skill set. I like Tom, and I agreed with many things he said in the book, but I disagreed with some too, and just found it all to be generally uninteresting. Does that count as my review?? It doesn't really matter. I didn't get it in by the deadline, so I guess it's still just nineteen books.
But it's a brand new year, and I have a brand new Kindle! My brother gave it to me for Christmas (thanks, Kevin!), and so far I love it...for the most part. I didn't realize that the new ones are ad driven, which I don't care much for. Instead of being able to select the picture that comes up when the device has been unattended, it shows a full screen ad for something. I've learned to aggressively tune it out though, to the point where I'm not likely to consume any of the products or services by companies, simply out of spite, which might be something that advertisers should take note of. Still, it's nice to finally have an e-reader. The Kindle is pretty neat. The screen is easy to read, and I like the fact that I can adjust the font size so I don't need my reading glasses. I'm certainly not giving up on paper books, though. I still enjoy the experience of browsing though a book store or a public library, picking up the books, leafing through them, previewing them to see if I want to read them. Yes, I know, you can do that online too, but it's not the same.
You'd think that participating in this challenge would make me want to expand my collection of books, but in fact it has had almost the opposite effect. I quickly realized that if I bought every book that I read, I could easily wind-up spending $1000 dollars a year in books, not to mention the money I would spend on shelves to put them on, and a bigger place to live. Therefore I go to the library once or twice a week to see if there's anything new and/or interesting to read. Of course the first thing I wanted to know when I got my Kindle was, "Where are the free books?" Amazon has some, but clearly wants to push you towards books you pay for. I've been checking out FeedBooks and Gutenberg, and both look like they have some interesting stuff, although I don't know if FeedBooks just gets all their free stuff from Gutenberg. My library has e-books to lend as well, but I haven't yet had a chance to explore this. Given that I have a foot-high stack of physical book potential reads sitting on my desk, not to mention what's already in my Kindle, I'm not sure how soon I'm going to get to it.
After I've said all that, Amazon will be happy to know that the first full book I read on my Kindle is one I paid for, albeit not much. On the Kindle site they had a special for Life of Pi by Yann Martel, for only 99 cents, which could possibly be less money than they had to pay to process my credit card transaction. Serves 'em right for mucking up my Kindle with ads. Anyway, on to the review.
Book 01 - Life of Pi - Yann Martel
This is the story of Piscene Molitor Patel, a very religious Indian boy, from a not very religious Hindu family, who is named after a Parisian swimming pool. Pi is so religious that not one religion can contain him. He is not content to be simply Hindu, so he decides to become a devout Catholic and a devout Muslim. Not one right after the other, mind you, but simultaneously. He goes to the Hindu temple, attends Catholic mass with communion on Sunday, and kneels on a prayer rug facing Mecca and offers his prayers to Allah five times a day. Of course, everyone tells him he cannot be all three, he must choose one. To this he simply asks, "Why?"
Pi's father owns a zoo in Pondicherry. a former French colony in India. This is mid-seventies India, and Indira Gandhi's policies eventually lead the father to sell the zoo and move the family to Toronto, Canada, to start a new life. After much wheeling and dealing, he manages to sell or trade-off all the animals. Of course few of these transactions are local ones, as there are a limited number of zoos in the immediate vicinity that can absorb these animals, so when the family finally books passage to Canada on a cargo ship, they have many of the animals along with them, to be dropped off at various points along the way.
Not too far along on their journey, an unknown mishap causes the ship to sink, and Pi finds himself in one of the ship's lifeboats, seemingly the sole human survivor. Note the emphasis on human. Pi shares the lifeboat with a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a 450 pound Bengal tiger. What follows is an incredible tale of survival. Note the emphasis on incredible. Pi survives 227 days at sea in a life boat with two predators and two other animals strong enough to kill him by accident. He faces storms, starvation, lack of fresh water, and a mysterious island that holds a horrible secret, all while managing not to be eaten by the tiger.
In my opinion, the book gets off to a slow start. It gets a little bogged down with all of Pi's religious explorations, as well as a bunch of seemingly disjointed information about the nature of animals in captivity vs. the wild. Once Pi finds himself on the lifeboat though, this tiger tale becomes quite riveting. Pi must battle nature on all fronts - if the elements don't kill him, the tiger will.
Although the tiger presents a constant lethal danger, Pi and the animal reach an uncomfortable detente. The tiger is dependent on Pi for food and water, and Pi is strangely dependent on the presence of the beast to maintain the will to live. Ultimately Pi finds that he cares deeply for this animal that could kill him at any moment.
Based on the emphasis on religion in the first part of the book, it wasn't too surprising that there is a religious moral to the story. In order to believe Pi's incredible story, one must have faith, as his tale can be neither proven or dis-proven. Once you buy into the story, one could argue that Pi's "miraculous" survival is due to his actions and his will to live, rather than any special divine intervention. On the other hand, one could argue that this strength and will to live comes from his faith. Pi would probably be the first one to do so.
No sense dwelling in the past. I had a miserable showing last year. I read nineteen books, twenty really - but I never bothered to review Tom Brokaw's The Time of our Lives, even though I finished it weeks ago. For a while there I was frantically trying to finish books in a futile attempt to make a decent showing, but eventually I just decided to fall back, regroup and try again for 2012.
I think part of the problem I had with Brokaw's book was that I didn't buy into the premise that reporting on the news for many years qualified you to identify solutions for what ails us as a nation. I don't think it disqualifies you either - I think it's just a separate skill set. I like Tom, and I agreed with many things he said in the book, but I disagreed with some too, and just found it all to be generally uninteresting. Does that count as my review?? It doesn't really matter. I didn't get it in by the deadline, so I guess it's still just nineteen books.
But it's a brand new year, and I have a brand new Kindle! My brother gave it to me for Christmas (thanks, Kevin!), and so far I love it...for the most part. I didn't realize that the new ones are ad driven, which I don't care much for. Instead of being able to select the picture that comes up when the device has been unattended, it shows a full screen ad for something. I've learned to aggressively tune it out though, to the point where I'm not likely to consume any of the products or services by companies, simply out of spite, which might be something that advertisers should take note of. Still, it's nice to finally have an e-reader. The Kindle is pretty neat. The screen is easy to read, and I like the fact that I can adjust the font size so I don't need my reading glasses. I'm certainly not giving up on paper books, though. I still enjoy the experience of browsing though a book store or a public library, picking up the books, leafing through them, previewing them to see if I want to read them. Yes, I know, you can do that online too, but it's not the same.
You'd think that participating in this challenge would make me want to expand my collection of books, but in fact it has had almost the opposite effect. I quickly realized that if I bought every book that I read, I could easily wind-up spending $1000 dollars a year in books, not to mention the money I would spend on shelves to put them on, and a bigger place to live. Therefore I go to the library once or twice a week to see if there's anything new and/or interesting to read. Of course the first thing I wanted to know when I got my Kindle was, "Where are the free books?" Amazon has some, but clearly wants to push you towards books you pay for. I've been checking out FeedBooks and Gutenberg, and both look like they have some interesting stuff, although I don't know if FeedBooks just gets all their free stuff from Gutenberg. My library has e-books to lend as well, but I haven't yet had a chance to explore this. Given that I have a foot-high stack of physical book potential reads sitting on my desk, not to mention what's already in my Kindle, I'm not sure how soon I'm going to get to it.
After I've said all that, Amazon will be happy to know that the first full book I read on my Kindle is one I paid for, albeit not much. On the Kindle site they had a special for Life of Pi by Yann Martel, for only 99 cents, which could possibly be less money than they had to pay to process my credit card transaction. Serves 'em right for mucking up my Kindle with ads. Anyway, on to the review.
Book 01 - Life of Pi - Yann Martel
This is the story of Piscene Molitor Patel, a very religious Indian boy, from a not very religious Hindu family, who is named after a Parisian swimming pool. Pi is so religious that not one religion can contain him. He is not content to be simply Hindu, so he decides to become a devout Catholic and a devout Muslim. Not one right after the other, mind you, but simultaneously. He goes to the Hindu temple, attends Catholic mass with communion on Sunday, and kneels on a prayer rug facing Mecca and offers his prayers to Allah five times a day. Of course, everyone tells him he cannot be all three, he must choose one. To this he simply asks, "Why?"
Pi's father owns a zoo in Pondicherry. a former French colony in India. This is mid-seventies India, and Indira Gandhi's policies eventually lead the father to sell the zoo and move the family to Toronto, Canada, to start a new life. After much wheeling and dealing, he manages to sell or trade-off all the animals. Of course few of these transactions are local ones, as there are a limited number of zoos in the immediate vicinity that can absorb these animals, so when the family finally books passage to Canada on a cargo ship, they have many of the animals along with them, to be dropped off at various points along the way.
Not too far along on their journey, an unknown mishap causes the ship to sink, and Pi finds himself in one of the ship's lifeboats, seemingly the sole human survivor. Note the emphasis on human. Pi shares the lifeboat with a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a 450 pound Bengal tiger. What follows is an incredible tale of survival. Note the emphasis on incredible. Pi survives 227 days at sea in a life boat with two predators and two other animals strong enough to kill him by accident. He faces storms, starvation, lack of fresh water, and a mysterious island that holds a horrible secret, all while managing not to be eaten by the tiger.
In my opinion, the book gets off to a slow start. It gets a little bogged down with all of Pi's religious explorations, as well as a bunch of seemingly disjointed information about the nature of animals in captivity vs. the wild. Once Pi finds himself on the lifeboat though, this tiger tale becomes quite riveting. Pi must battle nature on all fronts - if the elements don't kill him, the tiger will.
Although the tiger presents a constant lethal danger, Pi and the animal reach an uncomfortable detente. The tiger is dependent on Pi for food and water, and Pi is strangely dependent on the presence of the beast to maintain the will to live. Ultimately Pi finds that he cares deeply for this animal that could kill him at any moment.
Based on the emphasis on religion in the first part of the book, it wasn't too surprising that there is a religious moral to the story. In order to believe Pi's incredible story, one must have faith, as his tale can be neither proven or dis-proven. Once you buy into the story, one could argue that Pi's "miraculous" survival is due to his actions and his will to live, rather than any special divine intervention. On the other hand, one could argue that this strength and will to live comes from his faith. Pi would probably be the first one to do so.
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