For an animal lover, this isn’t the greatest book in the world. A good portion of the book deals with vivid descriptions of how animals are killed and eaten by man or by beast.

And let me save you about 100 pages. The whole entire first part can be skipped. Pi likes animals. His family are zookeepers. His dad thinks tigers are the most dangerous animals on the planet. Pi secretly goes around practicing Muslim, Christian and Hindu religions until they all find out about each other’s roles in Pi’s life and try to convince him to choose one – theirs. And because money isn’t good and India is falling apart his family decides to get on a boat with all their animals and move from India to Canada.

There, 100 pages saved – completely skip that part of the book.

The remainder of the tale is nearly its equal in boredom. Maybe I’m just not “proper” enough to “get it” but it wasn’t my favorite book. The most interesting part was when Pi finds a floating island of flesh-eating algae. And the final conversation with the Japanese men who want a believable tale about why their boat sank was also interesting.

The rest of the book I could have skipped.

Beware of the New York Times bestseller list.