blogging the lunch hour away

I finally read Life of Pi. It came highly recommended by the lovely Catlin, and by an oddly-dressed stranger at my local library. At least I knew Cat’s taste could be trusted.

I know I liked Life of Pi because I read it in a few days. Now I’m stuck trying to pin down exactly why I liked it. In fact, I’m still trying to pin down what I would say to someone who asked what the book was about. I could say it’s about a kid from India stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a Bengal tiger. But I think the book is mostly about stories. (Probably not the answer you give to random strangers in the library.) It made me think about how people choose which stories to believe and which stories to live – how lives are made up of stories. Here’s a bit from the book that gets me thinking about this:

I can well imagine an atheist's last words: "White, white! L-L-Love! My God!"--and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, "Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain," and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.

So there you go. In addition to taking on philosophy, survival, world religions, zoology, love, and faith, the best stuff in the book is about choosing the better story.