Life of Pi

Life of Pi is a Philosophical, drama, adventure novel written by Yann Martel and published in 2001. The plot follows Piscine "Pi" Molitor Patel, a young zookeeper who's the only survivor of a shipwreck aside from a dangerous Bengal Tiger, Richard Parker.

Why it Rocks

 * 1) Lots of vivid detail in the writing that describes the scene to make you feel very much like you're actually there.
 * 2) Pi is a very interesting character, with a great deal of his life talked about throughout, such as how he was named after a pool in France that his uncle loved and changed his name to Pi because people kept calling him "Pissing", whether intentionally or not.
 * 3) There's a surprising amount of believability in the story that makes it feel like it actually happened, Martel even puts in a biographical piece about his early failures as an author and how he came to meet Pi, the latter half of that and the book by extension are fictionalized, but it's not very clear and seems very real.
 * 4) On that note, there's plenty of pretty funny moments in appropriate times, like how Pi starts out Hindu, but then discovers Christianity and Muslim cultures and tries to worship all three, only for officiates in each culture to get pissed about it and argue about their respective religions. The book has many religious overtones, but it actively encourages people to question their religion and find a better reason for worshipping it rather than doing so blindly.
 * 5) Another pretty funny backstory in how Richard Parker got his name, in that a mix-up in the paperwork between the name of the hunter who caught him and the name he came up with for the tiger.
 * 6) Plenty of emotional moments throughout as well, such as how Pi's family is shown to be a big part of his life, and losing them in the shipwreck depresses him greatly. And being that he's a vegetarian, but running out of food, he's forced to kill and eat fish in order to survive, which he regrets.
 * 7) The relationship between Pi and Richard Parker goes from a typical "food chain" type relationship, with the latter being a great threat to the former, to a much more platonic relationship, where they come to rely on each other simply for company to be inspired to survive, and also the fact that Richard Parker saves Pi's life at a few points rather than taking it.
 * 8) Pi tells an entirely different story completely different from the rest of the book when a couple of detectives don't believe him, in that his mother was killed by the cannibalistic cook of the ship, which baits the question of which story is actually true and which one is actually a lie. It ultimately leaves that decision entirely up to the reader, which is interesting.
 * 9) There's also a few strange moments that may or may not have been real, like how Pi was nearly killed by a frenchman after being blinded from exposure, only for Richard Parker to kill him instead, and then drift onto an island that apparently has carnivorous plants.
 * 10) At the end of the novel, Pi has become much more frugal with food, for obvious reasons, which shows how this ordeal has changed him greatly.
 * 11) The movie, directed by Ang Lee, does a fantastic job adapting the source material, even if it had to tone some things down (like Pi trying to use feces as an alternate source of food), and won four Oscars, which is definitely earned.

The Only Bad Quality

 * 1) The aforementioned scene in WIR #11 is pretty disgusting and unnecessarily detailed, even if it had some sort of context.