#101 in Adventure
Life of Pi
- 351
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
- NYT bestseller · 12 weeks on the list, peaked at #6
- Booker Prize
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Our view
“Life of Pi” is two books in one: a survival story and a meditation on faith. The first puts a boy in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger; the second asks how a story shapes what is taken as true. The adventure carries the reader; the reflection is what stays. Those who come only for the sea should know that spirituality takes up a good share of the book, which prefers questions to answers.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Life of Pi is a Canadian philosophical novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist is Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry, who explores issues of spirituality and metaphysics from an early age. After a shipwreck, he survives 227 days while stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker and an orangutan named Orange Juice along with several other zoo animals, raising questions about the nature of reality and how it is perceived and told.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.7 across 1,891 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 93% of the weight and the score stays at 7.8 — the Adventure average of 7.8 barely moves it. A further +0.10 comes from the small bonus for major awards.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.9 | 153 | 8% |
| Hardcover | 7.6 | 1.7K | 92% |
Frequently asked
How long is Life of Pi?
It has 351 pages — shorter than 59% of the ranked books in Adventure.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Adventure — with scores between 7.8 and 7.9, closest to this book.
