by Yann Martel
Mariner Books 2003

Method of Selection: It needed to be said.
First sentence: My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
Worst sentence: …the three toed sloth, such a beautiful example of the miracle of life, reminded me of God.
Reason I didn’t read this 10 years ago when everybody was reading it on the subway, if they weren’t reading Life of Bees or Salt: I had many video games to play.
Number of gods I believed in after reading the first three pages: 0.0094043887
Other reviews: None. I am the first reviewer of this book.

This book claims that it will make you believe in God. But instead it made me believe in shoplifting. The first pages of this book are taken up by an exposition of the narrator’s life as a student and some basic information about the life of three-toed sloths. I couldn’t help but make the obvious pun while reading how slow and plodding and slothful the writing is. It’s not that he’s bad, but that he’s boring. And I bet a lot of you agree with me.

Strangely, I felt compelled to read further, to see what happens with the tiger in the lifeboat and why it doesn’t eat the narrator (an event that doesn’t start until page 105, from what I could tell). I felt compelled not because it reads well, but because I know so many people love this book. Even Barack Obama likes this book (probably a libral conspiracy to take my guns). Some director with too much time on his hands even made a movie based on it with a fake tiger and some real tigers. And that is what scares me. Art ceases to be art when it cannot be appreciated on its own merits, when one only appreciates it out of social obligation. Perhaps many people thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish (many people also enjoy being peed upon), and perhaps many people were moved by its supposed spiritual elements. But how many people slogged through it and felt stupid for not enjoying it? I even feel somehow threatened just by going against the grain and not liking three pages of it.

To those who claim to have been moved spiritually by this book, I would suggest you were likely due for a spiritual movement already, and were reading Life of Pi by coincidence when it happened. Correlation, but not causality. I was having a bowel movement while I read it, but I do not claim that Yann Martel caused my shitting. Peristalsis and a very bad burrito did that.

Some may question my methods, saying that three pages isn’t enough to render judgment, but to them I say that the first three pages of a book are its most important, and if an author can’t make them fantastic, there’s little hope that he will suddenly turn it around for the following 316 and I will be transformed.

I would also like to point out that Yann Martel got the idea of crossing the sea with a giant jungle cat from a book review he read of another author’s story, called Max and the Cats, about a refugee who crosses the Atlantic with a jaguar. Not that stealing is such a big deal, although it takes some of the edge out of the premise to me. Also, it strikes me as too cute that this book has exactly 100 “chapters”.

This is a shitty book. A shitty book that made its author and everyone affiliated with it very very rich, and I’m sure none of them care at all what I or the millions who hated it think. I don’t know the mechanism that causes this. But I plan to find out. I’ll let you know.

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