Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho

The Story: A shepherd boy living in Spain (I think…) has a dream one night about treasure that is hidden in Egypt.  He makes the decision to follow his dreams, so he sells his sheep and sets off.

Along the way, he meets many people who guide him along this spiritual journey that he is on.  Some of them he meets only for a few minutes, some of them he stays with for a longer period of time.  The message is always pretty similar, “The world is coming together to guide you in the right direction. Just follow it.”

What I Thought: I had heard of this book a zillion times, but I had no idea what it was about going into it.  I’m glad because had I known that it was this kind of “follow your dreams” inspirational fable, I may have decided not to read it. I would consider that “not really my thing.”

This really was not that bad.  I will admit that it got repetitive.  The “messengers” all told him just about the same thing, but sometimes I guess you have to hear it more than once.

The part that I liked the most came towards the start.  The boy is working in a crystal shop with a man who used to have a dream to travel to Mecca, but now would rather have the dream than to actually do it.  The boy only meant to stay with him for a week or so to raise money, but ends up being there much much longer.  Finally, he decides that although he’s good at the crystal business, it is not his dream so he moves on.  These two different perspectives on dreams lined up right beside each other really kind of spoke to me.

The line that kind of got me the most was this one: “Forget about the future, and live each day according to the teachings, confident that God loves his children.  Each day, in itself, brings with it an eternity.”  I just love that last part. “Each day, in itself, brings with it an eternity.”  I love that.

The writing in and of itself was just kind of simple and sparse and beautiful.  Nothing was really spelled all the way out and it took a lot of filling in the blanks to develop a good picture of what was going on, but I think that this was completely intentional on the part of the author.  He said what needed to be said and just kind of left the rest up to the reader.

Conclusion: This would be a great book to buy for someone who is kind of going through a life change or who is graduating from high school or something.  It’s a good book that is worth the time it takes to read it, for sure.