Whoops, missed a book
I’d meant to include this as a second book topic in my post yesterday and it totally slipped my mind. I also recently finished another audible book to which I’m going to give a luke-warm review.
I listened to “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel over the course of about 3 weeks. As always, since it was available, I listened to the unabridged version of the book and this was one of the first that I was kind of wishing had been abridged-only from Audible.
Now don’t get me wrong. It was ok. But it really dragged for the first 2/5, really really dragged for the next 2/5, and had an overly tidy but interesting wrap-up at the end.
The story, in short, is that a young man who is uncomfortable with his name is living in India and his family runs a zoo (the first 2/5). Then his family decides to move to Canada, selling and/or keeping the various animals – they are traveling in a ship which goes down in the middle of the ocean, and he (Pi – the young man) ends up in a lifeboat with a couple of the animals. Then at the end of the book — the most interesting part in my opinion – he tells some executives from the shipping company both the story that you, the reader, have already been told. The execs don’t believe it, so he constructs a “more plausible” version of the story for them, casting significant doubt on the credibility of the narration you’ve just read.
So that unreliable narrator bit was pretty good, but the rest of the book was a bit boring to me. Between this one and the last one, I’ve really fallen behind in my reading schedule (I now have 5 books queued up at Audible that I have not yet started!). Need to get back on track or I’ll never catch up!
