Rating: 
Summary: I've changed my mind!
Review: I've been a poorly misguided soul, quick to judge, quick to cast negative thoughts, an arrogant seller of fool's gold, an evil-doer in all respects. Please, is there any forgiveness? This book is simply amazing. The ending pieces it all together and has absolutely changed me in a manner like no other! The ending is amazing, and the poetry is complete. I wish that all divinations be provided upon this book!
Rating: 
Summary: It's okay....
Review: Do yourself a favor and skip the first 100 pages. They add nothing to the book. It's only at around pg 102 that things get tolerable. On occasion, the book turns preachy, and the author frequently falls into "telling the story" rather than "showing it". (Telling me that this book is miraculous and will make me believe in God just doesn't cut it. I'm still an agnostic.) Also, the author frequently runs into entire chapters where he starts sentences with the same word, over and over. You'd think he'd add some variety, but I guess it's avante-garde to start each sentence with the word "I" or "He" and then go on and on in the smallest minutiae possible about a certain event. Just say you what you did and move on! Grrrr! On the whole, I put it somewhere slightly above stephen king and somewhere very far below Hemmingway. I give it 3 stars for effort.
Rating:
Summary: Wading into a philosophical pool, Martel is out of his depth
Review: I found Life of Pi to be well-written, imaginative and fairly engaging, but... Booker prize? I don't know. The book is a very long build up to one philosophical opinion that is ultimately a bit of a let down. Although he writes well, Martel is clearly out of his depth tackling philosophical subjects like truth, belief and reality. Martel's opinion is: we can choose to believe that there is no God, and endure a Godless world (which he simply assumes would be less desirable than a world where there is a God), or to believe that there is a God, and enjoy a "better story." A tool he uses, although in only a very minor way, to support this view is to borrow from a pragmatic philosophical viewpoint similar to that found in such philosophers as Richard Rorty (see Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature), now of Stanford University. I've heard complaints that Martel, after introducing the boy Piscine who, raised a Hindu, comes to embrace Catholicism and Islam while continuing to practice Hinduism, later abandons this "many roads to heaven" theme when the story moves to the open ocean and to Piscine's ordeal as a castaway. This view is mistaken. It is true that Piscine, while drifting on the open seas for weeks, and then months, fails to be motivated by this experience to come closer to God (he only "turns to God" in chapter 93, just before his ordeal ends - too late!), or to encounter feelings of anger toward God, or to reject his religious convictions, but this is good. Experimenting with how hardships affect one's religious convictions is a worn out theme and would have been far too predictable. Martel does not use Piscine's attraction to the three religions in order to prove that one can worship all three consistently, or to explore the close relationship between these faiths. At the end of the book we see that his motivation with Piscine's religious triad is to say that we believe things not because they're true, but because they will make our lives more rewarding. In the case of the three faiths, since their truth or falsehood cannot be proven (so he says), why not believe in and enjoy them all? At the end of the book, when Piscine is encouraged to tell "what really happened" and we come to the version of the castaway story that does without the animals, Piscine says "Isn't telling about something already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention? The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?" After presenting this rather Kantian idea of sensory experience, Piscine continues "You want words that reflect reality? Words that do not contradict reality? I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want dry, yeastless factuality." With these later comments, Martel seems to betray his earlier claim that "the world isn't just the way it is." He can't have it both ways, that there is something called reality and that reality is reflected by things called facts, and also claim that there is no way the world is. Perhaps we can assume that he really meant it when he said that there is no way the world is, but it would have been clearer if he had used single quotes in the above sentence to call the notion of an objective reality into question, for example: "You want words that reflect 'reality'?" or even "You want words that reflect a so-called 'reality'?". The problem with Martel's thesis is that people do not, and can not, simply choose their beliefs, so for him to encourage us to believe in God to "see further" or whatever is pointless. We believe what we believe because we can not do otherwise. Try believing that you don't really like your favorite food, or that you crave cigarettes when you don't, or that you don't love your children, or that you're a hundred feet tall. Hey, try believing in God if you don't, and vice versa. You can't! Martel does make the very poor analogy that being an agnostic is like "choosing immobility as a means of transportation" so perhaps he is simply encouraging those whom he imagines as being nothing more than undecided - as if they could just lean one way or the other at will - to lean towards God. Another problem with Martel's thesis is that while we see that we can't just choose to believe something, we also see that believing something doesn't make it true. Martel makes the debatable claim that one can't prove or disprove God's existence. This, he says, means that it shouldn't make any "factual difference" to people whether they believe or disbelieve in God, but since (he assumes) it will make their lives somehow more meaningful, we might as well just believe in God. Well, it should strike most of us as rather bizarre that someone would suggest that it doesn't make any difference to any of us whether or not our beliefs are true, and that all we should care about is feeling good. Whatever happened to the notion of truth? The pragmatism that Martel seems to draw from deals with issues of truth in great detail, but Martel never faces issues such as this one squarely. Granted, tackling philosophical issues in novels is difficult to do in a way that covers all the bases while remaining entertaining.
Rating: 
Summary: A Zookeeper's Son!
Review: This is Martel's second novel, and the winner of last year's Booker Prize. It tells the story of 16-year old Pi Patel, a young zookeeper's son, who ends up stranded on a raft in the middle of the ocean with a 450 pound Bengal tiger named Parker on board with him. The circumstances leading up to Patel's being stranded on the raft and the unbelievable experiences he goes through, along with his overactive imagination, are what make this book truly exciting and a joy to read. It makes you wonder if you were in the same circumstances, would you be able to survive at sea alone for 227 days. The first part of the book discusses the idea of incorporating the world's religions and it seemed to drag on much too long. The story redeemed itself in the second half with the boy's adventure on the sea, and the complicated and unexpected turn of events that bring the story to a close.
There was much more to this story than I expected. It's true, I didn't care for some parts of it, but I was very impressed with the second half of the book, and surprised by the way it ended. It will make you think about what is and isn't reality. It's a book to contemplate and read more than once. This is one of those books I will always remember! Joe Hanssen
Rating:
Summary: Captivating
Review: When I was given this book, I actually knew very little about it. The book jacket wasn't very helpful, mentioning only a boy, a tiger and the vast Pacific Ocean. It almost hints at a light tale of adventure, but like the ocean, it is deeper than it seems at the surface. This is the story of Pi, an Indian teenager who, while emigrating from India to Canada with his family, winds up being the sole human survivor when the ship sinks. The emphasis is on "human" as he winds up sharing his lifeboat with a tiger, orangutan, hyena and zebra, a small menagerie from the ship's holds who were to be transported to various zoos. Nature takes its course until only the tiger is left, and Pi is forced to form an uneasy alliance with the cat. There is little that is sentimental in this relationship and no sweet friendship; the tiger remains a dangerous carnivore and never cute or cuddly. This has most of what you would want in a story: humor, suspense, adventure, and mystery. Add to this, a healthy portion of theology and a good serving of horror and this is a complete literary meal, both tasty and with the recommended daily allowance of quality.
Rating:
Summary: A clever, brutal, beautiful and haunting story
Review: Although the first chapters are rather slow and a little pedantic, from the moment you are on the lifeboat with Pi and the animals you will be gripped, spellbound and horrified.
Pi's telling of his ordeal is unbelievably believable. At times it is so brutal you can't read on, at others it is so beautiful it will make you want to weep.
This is a book to be read on more than one level and more than once. The last few pages will change your whole perspective on the story and you will be left wondering whether you have misunderstood Pi completely and whether you should go back and read the whole book again. This is where the Life of Pi is so very clever and so very chilling, revealing the dark side of human nature by comparing it to the instinctive nature of animals. This book makes Tom Hanks' Castaway look like a romantic comedy.
Rating:
Summary: Fresh Air
Review: Some times there is a book that is so different from anything you've ever read...And when you find a book like that it is so exciting, so amazing, it renews your faith in the talent of writers still "out there". Life of Pi is one of those books for me. It was just so different from what I had been reading lately, it was like a breath of fresh air. What I really enjoyed about the book was that I learned a lot about the habits of animals. Did you know that if a hyena becomes hot he will urinate on the ground to create a mud bath & roll around in it to cool off? I also learned a lot about what to do if I was stranded in the middle of the ocean and how to survive. I didn't know that there are contraptions to turn salt water into fresh water. I found out you can kill a sea turtle and drink his blood. I thought the author did a tremendous job of putting you in Pi's shoes and what it would be like to be alone in the middle of the Pacific ocean. How would you feel? His words almost brought me to tears. And the scenes where he had to kill for food, literally made me gag. His injuries due to exposure or lack of food made me cringe. If you liked the movie Cast Away, I'd recommend this book. Or if you like adventure books. Or anything about human nature and survival. As the author boasts, this story will make you believe in God.
Rating: 
Summary: it had so much potential
Review: I never put a book down unfinished without a feeling of disappointment. I suppose what made putting away 'Life of Pi' much more so was the fact that I'd expected a lot from it. A teenager cast adrift with a menagerie of animals, taming a tiger at sea, this book should have been brilliant.
But it wasn't.
I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it was that made the story, despite all its promise, sink for me. A few people have commented that this book read more like a how-to-survive-at-sea manual than a novel, and I have to agree with them. I felt there was no light and shade in the book, even before Pi was shipwrecked, it just kept bobbing along at the same snail's pace the whole way through. Maybe it was that the book seemed to be all telling and no showing . . . there's only so long you can sustain shallow didactics on religion at the beginning of a story when the entire book has been marketed on its sea journey.
Maybe the problem was that I felt the story had every pretense towards magic realism - the type that wouldn't have had the animals burst into song, but that they would have found some means to co-exist with one another. But that doesn't happen, and as a reader I felt cheated since that's what I'd been led, rightly or wrongly, to expect. Basically three animals are killed off (at the book's usual turtle crawl); my question then is why they were there in the first place. They served no purpose other than to show that yes, a hyena is a carnivore, and yes, a tiger is a big carnivore.
But most disappointing for me was the character of Pi(scine) himself - I felt nothing for him as a character, either for or against. There was nothing to him at all; he's defined entirely by the circumstances around him, and we never get anything more than the glossed surfaces of his thoughts. I sympathised more with the orangutan than the main character. Overall, I felt the book was shallow and painfully long-winded. The short-listed novels for the Booker Prize must have been pretty ordinary last year.
Rating:
Summary: An imaginative trip
Review: This is an excellent book about religion, mysticism, hope, adventure, and survival. After a shipwreck, the lead character, Pi, finds himself adrift on the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat filled with unusual animals. I suppose the first obvious parallel is with Noah from the bible, though I'm not sure the author was aiming for such a simplistic interpretation. With all the time adrift on the ocean, both the reader and the author have ample time to consider both the mundane and the mystical. The quality of writing is superb and the story moves with excellent pace. Overall, a wonderful book that nearly everyone will enjoy. Avery Z. Conner, author of "Fevers of the Mind".
Rating:
Summary: Not for everyone - but right for me!
Review: Life of Pi is the type of book that I wish my friends were reading. As soon as I finished the book I had a strong desire to discuss it with someone - but this book is esoteric. I need a fellow reader who appreciates Indian culture, has a twisted fascination with religion, is enchanted with wild life, and has the ability to READ BETWEEN THE LINES! There is so much in this book worthy of discussion that it is a complete disservice to tell people "It is about a boy who becomes shipwrecked and is stuck on a lifeboat with a tiger." There were passages in this book (including a desperate prayer) that I wanted to copy down and hang up somewhere! A page and a half on the physical effects of fear - the same fear and tension Pi feels being trapped with a tiger, some of us experience at work an stuck in traffic. Pi's honest desire to seek God and do the right thing, then his slipping in complete survival mode and being forced into a position where he must learn to outsmart and manipulate others could be a commentary on modern life, for those who look for such things. In spite of my interest, I'm not sure this book made it into my top ten favorite - but it definately has me thinking. It is the type of book that keeps me from picking up a new one for a few days after I finish.
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