If Pi’s rationing, solar stills, and careful training of Richard Parker kept you riveted, you’ll love watching Mark Watney hack survival out of thin Martian air. In The Martian, he turns a barren planet into a farm, jury-rigs life support, and plans long-range rover treks with the same meticulous, hopeful grit Pi shows on the lifeboat—right down to meticulous logs and "one problem at a time" thinking.

Like when Pi offers the officials two stories—one with Richard Parker, one without—Tim O’Brien keeps asking what kind of truth stories can hold. In The Things They Carried, chapters like “How to Tell a True War Story” rewrite events, question memory, and circle back on moments (like Curt Lemon’s death) to show how a tale can be both invented and emotionally true, echoing the choice you make at the end of Life of Pi.

If Pi praying as a Hindu/Christian/Muslim while adrift—and asking where God is amid the vast Pacific—moved you, Silence will speak to that same ache. Father Rodrigues’s mission to Japan tests belief through persecution, betrayal, and the haunting quiet of God; scenes with the fumie and Kichijiro’s wavering conscience mirror Pi’s ocean-long argument with the divine.

If you appreciated the allegorical richness of Pi’s journey—the carnivorous island, the tiger as a mirror of the self—The Little Prince offers another deceptively simple tale that keeps unfolding. The aviator’s desert crash, the fox’s lesson about taming, and the rose and baobabs build a symbolic map of love, responsibility, and seeing with the heart, much like the layered meanings beneath Pi’s two stories.

If the uneasy partnership between Pi and Richard Parker fascinated you—the way respect and fear forged a survival pact—The Call of the Wild explores a different but equally primal bond. Following Buck through the Yukon, his ties to humans like John Thornton and his pull toward the wild create a tense, transformative relationship that, like Pi’s with the tiger, blurs the line between companion and force of nature.