Life of Pi

                  Like most people right now I read this book because I wanted to see the movie and hopefully I will be seeing this movie soon. It was actually the trailer for the movie and the imagery in it that convinced me to read the book. But if you've read any reviews of the movie you may have noticed how negative a lot of the reviews are, most people don't like how the movie bounces back and forth between Pi and a journalist, they also don't like how over the top and fantastical the movie turned out to be, but why shouldn't it be? The story of Pi is in itself a fantasy, or at least a tragedy masquerading as a fantasy. Let me try to explain.
                Pi is a sixteen year old boy who is named after a swimming pool, basically lives at a zoo and is in love with religion. If you had asked him, his life was pretty good until his family decided to move to Canada. It's there that everything goes wrong. Some of us have a harder path to walk than others and Pi's path was littered with water and corpses. Pi and his family board a boat bound for Canada only to have it sink a few days in, and this is how Pi finds himself stranded on a life boat with a tiger named Richard Parker in the middle of the ocean. This book is about how Pi and the tiger have to work together to survive.
                The imagery that Yann Martel paints is beautiful, you can feel the pain Pi feels, feel the power struggle between him and Richard Parker and eventually go blind with him. This book was a short, wonderful, intense read and the ending was nothing that I would've ever been able to expect. If fact it turned out to be completely different from what I expected. This book some how ended up being sadder and more magnificent than I thought possible. If you haven't gotten around to reading it, now is the time.