I felt like the author at one point bored of carefully writing the book and decided to just dump all his notes as last chapters. He starts really good, in a very short amount time I already felt very close the main character and the setting of the book.. However the minute he decides to break the flow of the and starts telling random bits the book died for me. ( )

From the cover art, this appears to be about a boy and a tiger in a boat. And it is, though it's conspicuously lacking of seafaring felines for more than the first quarter of the book. Up to that point it talks mostly about Pi's life as the son of a zookeeper in India and his quest to find religion (which he does - three of them, in fact). At times it's a little preachy, others a little graphic, but all in all it's a fairly believable tale about survival in a lifeboat. In a nutshell: Pi Patel's family decides to move from India to Canada. They travel by cargo ship with many of the animals from their zoo which are now being shipped to other zoos around the world. The cargo ship sinks, leaving Pi stranded on a lifeboat with a few animals who escaped the ship. He spends 227 days on the ocean, his thoughts taken up by survival: how to get food, how to get fresh water, how to avoid being eaten by the 450-pound Bengal tiger that shares his lifeboat. It's a classic man-versus-nature story, and if you enjoy movies like Castaway you will probably like this book as well. ( )

Unfortunately, a book that could have been awesome, sunk together with the boat.

* SPOILER *
The fact that the mighty tiger didn't do anything at all is really ridiculous... ( )

Possibly the best book I read in recent years. Since I discovered it in 2005 I have read it again and again, as if compelled by the urge of floating once more on the boat with my best friend Richard Parker, a bengaly tiger, in the middle of the ocean. I wouldn't survive without it. The Italian translation is far from decent, so I strongly recommend reading it in English. ( )

I really enjoyed reading this book - and I loved that I had to double-check that it was finished when I was done. ( )