The Alchemist

Up there with The Little Prince as one of the best books I’ve yet read. This was stunningly beautiful, and I get why people are so wild about it. I can also see why people have such diverging takeaways after reading the book; The Alchemist is so chock-full of analogies, proverbs and philosophical asides that each of those individual moments alone create outcomes for the reader far outside of the scope of the plot.

Here is my (personal and immediate) takeaway from the book. This is a book is a reminder that living life as a means to a given end really makes no sense; it is your classic “the journey is what matters” text. It is just delivered in such an imaginative, wandering and visual style that provides so many other roads for the reader to go down, that many too complexly try to decode Coelho’s work into more than it needs to be. The wealth that Santiago finally achieves at the end of the story is only made meaningful in reference to the roundabout journey that was required to achieve it, even though the “ends” were technically right there where he started the entire time.

A coincidence — I got through this book while spending a few hours in the Mojave Desert. While researching it after finishing, I saw that the author (after a sup-par reception to the book’s original publishing) spent 40 days in the Mojave to reflect, a process that led him to the book’s eventual success.