Pi is a young boy who finds himself in a lifeboat after the ship carrying his zoo-keeper family from India to Toronto is sunk in the South Pacific. Complicating matters somewhat is the fact that he is sharing the lifeboat with a full-grown Bengal tiger.
A friend loaned me this book several years ago and I’m just now finishing it even though I started back then and have picked away at it off and on since. So the first third of the book is a little fuzzy in my memory. This fragmented approach should not reflect badly on the book. I was just flipping through the first third to check some points and reading it now it threatened to pull me in with each paragraph. The style is conversational, digressive, and funny, moving from childhood trials to facts about the zoo animals to religious issues. But the shipwreck promised by the book’s cover doesn’t come until after that first third. Once Pi is in the lifeboat with the tiger it becomes significantly harder to put the book down. I think I have an inkling now, though, of how much more impact the book would have had if I’d had the concentration to read it straight through from the start. Should you read it, I strongly recommend this course.