Sucky Day, Life of Pi
Today sucked. It rained all day, was so disgusting that I didn’t even want to leave the house to go to lunch. That says alot.
I surfed the web all day, read up on the band RUSH, bought a Rush t-shirt, surfed pencam photo galleries.
I finished Life Of Pi. IT SUCKED!!!! I already said that I don’t usually read fiction because I find it a waste of time to read a story that isn’t even true (which is why I don’t read The Onion). If I’m going to read a story, it’d better be either, a) true, or b) really good and worth my time.
The book was compelling in the beginning because I love both Canada and India and was pleasantly surprised to find it involved both.
The story was interesting.
But then…
((( spoilers follow, so don’t read on if you plan to read the book… )))
… the majority of the book involved a boy on a life-boat w/ a tiger. Yay. Boring.
But then, at the end, the ultimate tragedy. The book broke a rule I was taught as early on as seventh-grade that an author should NEVER break… it ended with a kind of “it was all a dream!” twist.
Yeah, he did spend 7 months on the water, but was it with three other people or three other ANIMALS???
See, I already have a great deal of trouble deciding to read fiction. I find it more satisfying to read something that is true and/or educational. I’d ALREADY willingly supspended disbelief by deciding to even READ a fiction book in the first place. But to WASTE MY FREAKING TIME with 150 or more pages of a story that NEVER EVEN HAPPENED REALLY TWEAKS MY HIDE! I mean, a fiction story is fine if it’s good, but to end this fiction story by telling me that the character isn’t even sure the last 150 page even HAPPENED….!!!!
I don’t know if I’m explaining myself well or not. I already “agreed” to accept a false story by picking up a fiction book. But to end it by telling me that the whole sequence was a dream or a bad memory, that’s a fucking waste of my time.
I mean… even if I pick up “Interview With The Vampire“. I KNOW it’s fiction. But I’m willing to “suspend disbelief” if I know it’s going to be a good story that is going to draw me in and entertain me. But if “Interview With The Vampire” ended with some 15-year-old school boy waking up from a dream in study hall with drool on his desk and he had actually just dreamed the whole thing, the whole book would become invalid. Not because it was FICTION, but because it was a waste of my fucking time by ending badly!
I’m SO MAD that I wasted good time reading this book. I felt this way after I read “A Painted House“. Everyone kept telling me “oh, you gotta read it, so much happens, it really draws you in!“. I couldn’t wait. I borrowed it, and read it voraciously. Voraciously only because I was dying to see what was going to happen. Guess what? NOTHING HAPPENED! The book was a freaking bore! An entire story of a boy picking cotton and the boring people around him! I was so mad that for days on end I had wasted my life away reading this book!
Every minute that I am reading a lousy book I am wasting time that I could be doing something better, whether it’s surfing, talking to people, sleeping, whatever.
I read “Life Of Pi” in the car wherever we went over the laste few weeks, not talking to M. Poor M, listening to the radio in the car and not bothering me while I read. I missed good conversation time with M for nothing. If it had been a good book, at least it would have been fulfilling.
Not one second of reading “Why Girls Are Weird” was a waste. That book was GREAT front to back. Any conversations missed or hours of sleep lost were well worth it.
Nothing makes me madder than wasting time reading a book only to put it down at the end feeling like the author stole weeks of my life (I am a slow reader). I want to hunt Yann Martel down and give him a piece of my mind, and tie him to a chair and tell him bad stories for weeks on end until he “dies” of boredom or frustration.
(Leagal stuff: I have no intention to harm or kill anybody.)