Have you read Life of Pi by Yann Martel?

Should I? Am I missing something?

ok, why is "not that i'm aware of" an option? is it possible to not be aware if you've read something? oh, and my answer is no, i've never read it.

i would like to know if it's worth reading, though, as i like to read things that others recommend.

Nope, not a fan of it. Sorry.

No and please don't be placing adverts in your surveys. We see enough of those online without them being put deliberately into surveys.

Yes, I love that book. It shaped my perception on religion.

You should. It's a really good book. I would send it to you, but my sister has it. Everyone I know who's read it (well, it's four people, including me) loved it.

It's a REALLY good book. Check out the link I provided - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0156... Most people rate it with five or four stars and there is 976 reviews. I don't usually see that many reviews for a book on Amazon, even for Classics.

What's it about?

Never mind, I just saw the link you posted to BerrieGrrl... I'll go check it out.

Ha! Sounds good!

I think I have another book for you - it's not so fantastic but it's about a girl from India who eventually comes to Canada. It's a little like her memoirs but it's light hearted and black all at the same time... I enjoyed it and you would too (if I could find it - I'll search for it during my vacation.)

I really have to go to bed now... Check out my political replies to you in Forum. (And I didn't cut and paste anything!)

That book sounds very familiar. What's it called?

Yes, I think I should go to bed, too. It's 4am.

nope

I have. I really enjoyed it - I didn't like the bits where it got spacier towards the end (the discussion about food and the island). Even later when I understood better what the author was trying to do, I'm not sure that he pulled it off all that well. I did like the ending - although I'd suspected it (because of the spacier bits) I hadn't been certain. I think that there were a few plot-holes as well - but the book wasn't really about the plot.

No, although it's sort of generally on my list.

cool, i'll have to check it out

not yet, but it is on my list.............. the very long list that just keeps getting longer.

As I said in Qual, I see no need to advertise buying the book. If one wants to purchase this or any other book, I'm sure they would know where to go.

Yeah, exactly what I said in Qual, no spam. But it stayed in. Also don't agree plugging the purchase of anything.

No

Are you on the author's PR team?

Can't say I am.

nope...is it good?

Great minds think together!

its No

No, saw a movie called π though that was pretty good.

Interesting description. So what philosophy or revelation did you gain from it?

I'm awful with titles... I'll have to find it - I've just moved the stuff we kept in storage from our daughter's place to a new locker (in fact, it's all in our truck as I write). I'll be on my holidays this weekend so I'll be pocking around those boxes and I'll pull it out for you.

I just got up!

To love all religions and except them for what they are. Also, to be able to believe in all religions even if they greatly contract one another.

Can't imagine how one gets this from watching a tiger eat his raft mates. Do the animals talk & theosophize? I take it you mean 'accept' all religions; 'Excepting' the others happens too much already. ..because indeed, they do greatly 'contract' one another..
At the mystical core, they're all pretty much the same, a trinity feedback loop of unmanifest god, creation, and perception. Lotus sutras, catholocism, lotus sutras, jewish kabbalism, hindu shaivism, matrix movie - all the same concept.
On a dogmatic level, the religions fit together like art, math, & geography classes: some teach cosmology, some teach ethics, others teach perception. They each have different answers because each only considers religion to be a particular domain of spirituality. Ask an artist and a mathematician to define perfect form and you'll get two entirely different answers. Perhaps if one looks at both answers as concptual abstract metaphoric answers, they will be similar. As above, so below, as in one domain, so as in another.
Westerners like to lump buddhism and hindu as options to baptism, catholocism, etc., but buddhist and hindu are each probably more more diverse than the range of western religions. You have buddists saying to unrestrict your emotions, and buddhists saying you should deny all emotion. The range available seems to suit the range of potential human character regardless of geography.

I meant accepting not excepting. I often make these mistakes when spelling, my worse one was when I mixed up 'walk' with 'woke'.
Actually, only the first part of the book is about the religions. Before he gets lost in the Pacific.

Hom bad could it get? You wake the dog before going to bed?

No. You wanna make something of it?

I read it and loved it , so then i picked up yann martel's other sort-of autobiographical book "Self", which freaked me out a bit, and i didnt like it too much, so i didnt finish it! Unfortunately, after reading half of "Self",it lowered my opinion of "Life of Pi", I know it shouldn't, and it's still a great book, but still...

The movie 'Being There' seems saintly, but if you read the book, or another book of Jerzy Kosinski's, you find he's rooted in dark psychopathy, and worse, after you blow it off as safe fiction, you then read the jacket and find he was friends of celebrities who went through these things.
The world isn't black and white, and ;gkfakgsl; which congeal entirely upon dark or light witdh just a slight tweak demonstrate that well.

What do you mean it freaked you out?

A book is an investment of my limited time. If a book doesn't grab me after the first couple of chapters I don't feel any great obligation to carry on finding out that it also doesn't grab me for the next thirty. After hearing so many good things about it, I wanted to like it but quickly got bored with the tediously rambling self-important narrative. Canada blah blah.. India yadda yadda.. swimming lessons.. zzzzzzzz... zoo... bin.

Really? I found the beginning hilarious. I coudn't stop reading.

Hilarious? At what point does it start becoming hilarious? Nothing I read elicited any emotional response from me other than boredom and frustration. It got to the point that I was flipping the pages trying to see any little gem of prose or the slightest indication that the story had actually started. I'm not a very fast reader and it probably takes me a lot longer than you to read a book to its completion. There are so many books in my house that I haven't got around to reading yet. I can't afford to waste time on a book that doesn't interest me straight away.

I don't remember the beginning very well, but I know it drew me in straight away. But I can see it's one of those where you either like the writing style or you get bored by it. Have you ever read anything by David Guterson (like Snow Falling on Cedars")?

No, but looking at the reviews on Amazon I can see he's probably the kind of author that might turn to me drink or arson or both. I'm too impatient by far.

Life of Pi got very silly at the end with some very bad science that nearly made me throw it out the wondow. But then it turned out that it wasn't supposed to be good science, so I calmed down again.

I loved Snow Falling on Cedars, but it's very, very slow at times and he has a fondness for going off on huge tangents about the characters and their lives. I really liked his writing style, but I imagine a lot of people would find it very grating indeed!

I'm far more forgiving of slow pacing in film, but that's because I know the film is going to be finished in 3 hours or so. Plus, everyone takes the same amount of time to watch it. I work 10 hours a day and drive for another 2. I'm not prepared to devote two weeks of my life to reading a book that I find tortuously slow. My free time is too limited and like I said, I'm too impatient.

10 hours a day? That's pretty hefty as a standard work-day.

The joy of work! 9am to 7pm is pretty standard for me. One of our servers just crashed too so I'm just re-running the batch jobs that should've run while it was down and then I'm off.

Is it a rewarding job?

I'm talking to you aren't I?

Yes, it's rewarding. It challenges me yet allows me to work at my own pace. I have to deal with source code, but don't stop dealing with people face to face. My colleagues are similar to me and have similar interests so there's always plenty of banter.

That's a relief! My dad works long hours too, but he always feels his job is worthwhile so it's not so bad.

It's not that I think my job is worthwhile. I don't think many people are in the position of looking at their job and seeing the direct impact it is has on society. Most people are several stages removed from things that have a direct impact. I'm not curing cancer. My job is worthwhile in the sense that I collect a pay cheque at the end of every month and that cheque means I can live in my house and drive my car and have money left over to eat, drink and be merry. The fact is that I support IT systems that make your gas/electricity bill slightly more accurate. Whoop di doo! It's the people I work with that make it worthwhile. We're all university educated, we all like football, we all like films (but disagree on which ones are best), we all have similar political leanings (we all read the Guardian), we're all Monty Python nerds, we've all configured our browsers so they don't use the official company firewall (which blocks sites like SC).

It's probably always the people who make it truly worthwhile, even if you *were* curing cancer.

Bartering disposable labor for money is one of the few things can do without corresponding negative consequence. I figured one two month software project My team of four built obsoleted 1100 medical insurance secretaries for a decade or so. They can telemarket credit offers now.
Back in the 30's when food and shelter were automated, we should have worked less for the same qulity of life. Instead work is meaningless, and people compete to hold three meaningless, poorly paid jobs to maintain there quality of life. The problem, besides competing for fewer jobs, and needing more income that labor is worth, is that with each automation, the investors profit, not society.

That's exactly what my mum thought about the book. She started it and told me that it's incredibly boring.
The action starts after a while, but it's not exactly action. I dunno if you came as far as Pi Patel took up three religions and then talked about them and when his parents found that out. That's the part that really spoke to me.

> Life of Pi got very silly at the end with some
> very bad science that nearly made me throw it
> out the wondow. But then it turned out that it
> wasn't supposed to be good science, so I calmed
> down again.

You mean the part when Pi gets on that island with meerkats (are those even real animals)?

The whole book stands as a metaphore for what people do to the religoius stories just to make them more amusing and appealing to the people. That's at least what I got from the book.

I love meer-cats. Yeah, they're real.

The island, yes. I got that it was a metaphor at the end, but not while I was reading about it. I got all annoyed about how silly it was!

I jsut looked them up online, they're so cutsy

Their postures are quite human.

Yep. Like when they're standing. Kind of reminds me of squirlies.