'The Alchemist' by Paulo Coelho, 12/17/09

This book was fairly popular a couple of years ago. I have always been slow to follow trends.

The book is about a Shepard boy named Santiago who had a dream one night while sleeping in an old church that there is buried treasure at the pyramids in Egypt. He is about 17 years old. As Santiago is traveling to a village to sell his wool and see a girl he has a crush on he meets a mysterious stranger who tells him that he should pay attention to that dream, go to the pyramids and find his treasure. This stranger is a wise man who says that he can always come home, but he is young and should travel to this place, find what he is seeking first.

So the Santiago sells the stranger all his sheep and gets on a boat, which takes him to the area of Morocco, Africa. He doesn’t know where the pyramids are or how long it will take him to get there. His first day in Africa he meets someone who speaks his language, gives him all his money to buy camels which the stranger says will get them to the pyramids the next day. Of course this newfound friend has stolen his money and has disappeared into the crowd.

Santiago is destitute, alone is a strange place and jaded by the mysterious man he met in Spain telling him to follow that crazy dream. But over the course of the couple of years, Santiago has many adventures, meets many people he learns things from, learns a new language and eventually makes it to the pyramids.


At the pyramids Santiago does not find his treasure. Instead he is attacked by a man who says that if he had followed after everything he dreamed about he would be looking for treasure that was buried near a tree in a churchyard in Spain. That is where Santiago finds his treasure; near a tree in the very churchyard where he had is dream about the pyramids.

I enjoyed this book. It was dreamy, hopeful and had great insights to things you have probably heard a hundred times but thought was fluff. The moral of this story, from my point of view, is that the treasure you seek is probably where you would never think to look, but before you can find it you have to take a journey, where you learn to be satisfied with what you have.