The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

This book I read because of the all of the crazy acclaim it received. Everyone I talked to said that it absolutely changed their lives, so obviously I had to read it. I think the basic idea can be summed up in this quote:

"It's called the principle of favorability. Beginner's luck. Because life wants you to achieve your Personal Legend."

This book is most assuredly teachable, although I think that with its abstract ideas it may be better suited for a senior class, even AP. I believe that all students could have the potential to understand it, but that to have true class discussions where no one is left behind I would have to feel out the class before I assigned the book. It is designed in the manner of a fable or bedtime story with its magic and out-there personifications, like the capitalization in the above quote of 'personal legend'.

The book did change me, in a way. It is one of those books that I feel I will need to read again to pick up on things I missed the first time around. The idea in the book about the universe being on our side as individuals is a comfortable one, and I think that is what I struggle with. It's too comfortable. It would be so nice to assume that, so nice to think that something much greater than myself was pulling strings for me. I have even had events in my life that make me wonder if it is true, like when I discuss a scheduling conflict with someone only to have a nearby professor do all she can to help me. :) Despite this I think I am simply too jaded to appreciate this book in the way so many have appreciated it, and I feel that with a second reading (where I will know what I'm getting in to) I will be able to drink in the lessons a little deeper.

One quote that stuck out to me in the book was a bit of something said to the young boy hero by an elderly shopkeeper:

"You are forcing me to look at wealth and at horizons I have never known. Now that I've seen them, and now that I've seen how immense my possibilities are, I'm going to feel worse than before you arrived."

I think the reason that this struck me is that I was watching a T.V. special once a long, long time ago in which a woman's voice narrated an old letter written by a mother some time in the 18th century or thereabouts. To my memory she said:

"I have told my daughters never to read for pleasure. I want them to grow up happy and contentedly settle down and get married and have children. Books will only show them possibilities that they will never achieve, love that they will never find. No, I would rather my girls be ignorant and happy."

When I heard this I was struck, dismayed, and I never forgot it. I must have been in the third or fourth grade. I thought she was a terrible mother, but I thought to myself then, as I did when I saw the quote in "The Alchemist", I wonder how happy we would all be if we never knew of other ways of life? My 9 year old mind was boggled. And I realize now that my thoughts sounded like the beliefs of the Nazis in "The Book Thief"...