Sunday 7 November 2021

Quick post on a long-ish weekend...

You’d think that, with the extra hour we got today because of the clocks going back, I’d be more on top of things, but alas, I’ve managed to overbook my hour and now it’s late afternoon on a gorgeously golden day and I’ve still got plenty more to do before I rest., so this will, once again, be a short post.

My Volunteer book club met yesterday to discuss Yann Martel’s amazing book, Life of Pi, and everyone loved it.  This book tells the story of sixteen-year-old Pi Patel, the son of a zookeeper in India in the 1970s.  When the Patels decide to emigrate to Winnipeg, they board a ship with some of their animals that are being delivered to other zoos, but tragedy strikes and the ship sinks, with Pi being the lone survivor… except for a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a Bengal tiger.  Pi must manage his own “zoo” on the small lifeboat and hopefully save himself and as many animals as possible.  His days at sea are both monotonous and adventurous, and packed with details about his survival skills and his interactions with Richard Parker, the tiger who is his constant companion.  This book is about so much more than I can summarize here that I will just say that it was a fabulous reread for me and a real adventure for my book club members who have never read it before.  They commented that it was a “unique story”, that “everything was unexpected”, and that they “didn’t know where (the story) was going from minute to minute”.   They found the characters fascinating, and they wondered how Martel knew so much about the psychology of animals.  It was a book about zoology and theology, politics and human-animal connections.  We discussed the ending at length and, while I don’t want to give anything away, I’ll just say that we all liked the story about Pi and Richard Parker better than the other one.  If you haven’t already read this Booker Prize-winning novel, I would strongly recommend that you give it a try.

That’s all for today.  Enjoy the lovely mild fall weather.

Bye for now…
Julie

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