Life of Pi
I know it’s been a few years since this book was published (2001), and I have no excuse for not reading it sooner. But damn, it’s well-written. Like The Little Prince, it’s painful but beautiful to read.
Life of Pi is such a unique creature, I find the Library of Congress categories to which it has been assigned (found on the copyright page below the ISBN) absolutely bizarre and beside the point. Check them out:
1. Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc. – fiction.
2. Human-animal relationships – fiction.
3. Pacific Ocean – fiction.
4. Storytelling – fiction.
5. Teenage boys – fiction.
6. Ocean travel – fiction.
7. Zoo animals – fiction.
8. Orphans – fiction.
9. Tigers – fictions.
What kind of taxonomy is that? It’s like sticking The Little Prince under: 1. Extremely small planetary objects; 2. Foxes; and 3. Roses – the cultivation thereof!
We need a new category, about how we each build our own life story from the experiences spread before us. How a multiplicity of stories can be simultaneously true. How a story can have both a happy ending and an unhappy ending, and can make you cry even as you pick it up again to read it from the beginning. Then I can check out every book in this category, and read them all.