A friend in Canada sent a hardback version of this book to me in 2001. I started reading it, after about 25 pages, I skipped ahead a few pages, a chapter, a bit here and there then put it down. I thought it was going to move slowly and seemed...a little too heavy post 9/11. In fall of 2003 I was leaving for a long trip through Mexico when I decided to pick up a few books to take with me. I saw the paperback and felt like the book was familiar and bought it and a couple others. I started to read this book while traveling but in the heat and the dust I was too thirsty and hot to read about a character who was thirsy and hot and stuffed it in my backpack and quickly began reading what I brought with me. I finished all of the books I brought and gave them away in exchange for novels and poetry in Spanish. I read those books, translating wiht my dictionary and asking my then partner to read to me what I could translate. We finished those too. I was about to start Don Quixote in Spanish after visiting the Don Quiote iconographic museum in Guanajuato when my partner told me if I started that one he wouldn't help me read it while we were traveling. I put it away and was left with only Yann Martel's Life of Pi. After spending the day and evening out and coming back to our room in the wee hours to make love then relax I couldn't sleep. My partner snored, a singer in the club across from our hotel in the town center was singing loudly through the night, I enjoyed listening to the people outside. I picked up Life of Pi and began. When my partner awoke I didn't want to stop but we had a full itinerary and I would get to read again until we left for the next city. As boarded our bus though, I cracked that book open and read until we arrived in the city. Fey was ill from drinking the water, while he slept I lay on the bed next to him reading outloud. I finished the book over night. I couldn't stop thinking about it. To this day, Fey still swears we saw a Senegal tiger while we were traveling, "it must have escaped from a zoo, it was there, we fed it. Don't you remember?" "Of course, I do, the tiger ate you." "What? Oh, shut up. I know we saw it." He wanted to check the newspapers to find out if a tiger were loose. I can't explain what exactly changed, but after a certain point in the book, the boy, the tiger - I just wanted to know them a little longer.

I don't think Life of Pi deserves the low 2 star rating I gave it. But how could I help myself, after Martel got my hopes so high in the beginning, only to dash them against metaphorical rocks in a metaphorical sea? I don't think Pi went through such pain as I did when I realized to my dismay that the middle and the end of the book didn't come close to the engaging, complex beginning. I loved the incorporation of the religious theme into Pi's life at the beginning. The time in the zoo set the stage for what would follow. But once out to sea, the spiritual connections disappeared and instead I felt like I was reading a raw, literal account of a survivor's journey. Like Hemingway might have written, but not as well done. There were rare moments of connection and deeper understanding, but not enough to keep me afloat to the end. By the end of Pi's journey, I felt as devastated as he must have -I guess the author succeeded in making me feel empathetic? But I still felt hope that the end would pull through and make my suffering well worth it. Instead, I felt like the end was almost as bad as the middle. It brought back the metaphorical and spiritual feel to a certain degree, but not enough to redeem the book for me, and not in the direction I had hoped. If my expectations weren't so high, this book probably would have gotten a three, or if I could, a three and a half rating. But such is life, right Pi?