World Book Night Challenge 14/25

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

This was another eBook read, in fact at Christmas my mobile phone provider gave away lots of free gifts and a copy of this was one of them (in fact it was the only one I took advantage of) but due to format it was a book I read on the iPhone and not the Kindle.

I'm sure that we have a physical copy of this somewhere around the house and I know that Mr Bookworm read it many years ago, for some reason I'd avoided it until now.

I don't know what I thought the book was about but it certainly wasn't anything like I imagined. I loved the bits about life in India, the comparisons of religion and the epic journey. I felt like I was living life alongside Pi, and later on Richard Parker. The writing was so good and evocative that I felt seasick along with characters- I could smell India and the zoo.

And then it lost me.

A cannibalistic island and the idea that Richard Parker was in fact a human...? The transition jarred me out of the happy reading place I was in. To me it was like Martel had suddenly taken some mind altering substance but not stopped writing.

I might have missed the point, but I could believe the bit about surviving with a tiger on a lifeboat but it was the rest that broke my brain. The notes for reading groups at the end didn't help either.