The Alchemist Cover

The Alchemist

The Alchemist Book Cover The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho
Fiction
Harper Collins
April 25, 2006
208
August 17, 2015

"My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky." Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams." Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. The Alchemist is such a book. With over a million and a half copies sold around the world, The Alchemist has already established itself as a modern classic, universally admired. Paulo Coelho's charming fable, now available in English for the first time, will enchant and inspire an even wider audience of readers for generations to come. The Alchemist is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist. The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories have done, about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, above all, following our dreams.

For all the hype that this novel had, I just didn’t get it!  It was a kinda-okay story, and I managed to finish the book, but I just didn’t get the hype.  In reading the reviews prior to purchasing the paperback, I somewhat expected to be utterly transcended into a world of amazing tranquility, and come out of the book with a script of how to live a good and proper life.  I didn’t get any of that!

If you read or have read this book, and you managed to come out of it with an aura of tranquility or a blueprint for a happier life, I’d love to hear about it!

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