Unfortunately, the novel sputtered, coughed and died.  It happened in Matheran, not for from Bombay, a small hill station with some onkeys but no tea estates.  It’s a misery pecular to would-be-writers.  […] Your story is emotionally dead, that’s the crux of it.  The discovery is something sou-destroying, I tell you.  It leaves you with an aching hunger. 

From Matheran I mailed the notes of my failed novel.  I mailed them to a fictitious address in Siberia, with a return address, equally fictitious, in Bolivia.  After the clerk had stamped the envelope and thrown it into a sorting bin, I sat down, glum and disheartened.  “What now, Tolstoy?  What other bright ideas do you have for your life?”  I asked myself.

from Life of Pi by Yann Martel, page VII

So I’ve finished the author’s note, which that passage comes from, and read about thirty pages of the actual story.  That leaves me roughtly 324 pages to read by dinnertime tonight if I’m going to book club this evening.  My head hurts and my kids are very needy today (they’ve been sick) and my house is a mess and there’s so much to do.  324 pages seems as insurmountable as Moby Dick and Love and Peace combined at the moment.

Why yes, I have read three of four other books (and please let us not mention the copious amounts of fanfiction) since I checked this one out of the library.  What’s your point?