#MeiThoughtsAbout “The Alchemist”
I thought this could be a piece of content in itself, encouraging me to be motivated to share new stories on Medium. I’m not calling this a book review session because, to be honest, I often can’t be objective when it comes to reviewing a book I’ve finished reading. So I think of this as “telling” how I felt after reading a book.
Here we go.
Something that is not planned is always a surprise.
I found this book while looking for another book, which for some reason caught my attention more than the book I originally wanted to buy. In the end, I chose this book, The Alchemist.
I only found out how popular the book was when I considered buying it, judging by how positive everyone’s reviews were about it. To challenge myself again to try to finish the book in English (which happens to be Indonesian), I bought it.
There is a feeling of pleasure every time I read sentence by sentence about the way the main character in this book thinks, they call him “The Boy”. Living with the knowledge he learned a lot from books, I can call this shepherd always looking for opportunities to think positively. He was too wise, his thoughts made me smile subconsciously and underlined them with a pencil.
This book is about the boy’s journey to find what he has always called “treasure”. Going far from his hometown with the proceeds of selling his sheep, the boy faced many things which he always referred to as “an experience I never imagined would be experienced by a shepherd”.
I kept wondering how the boy’s journey would end, how he would finally find his treasure, what it would look like, and how he would react after all that journey.
My favorite part was the time when one of the refugees who beat the boy right in front of the Pyramid of Egypt said that he too had the same dream that the boy had. He dreamed that he was ordered to go to an old church that was not used, with a shepherd sleeping with many sheep in it. In the dream, it is explained that there is a treasure under the ara tree. However, the refugee did not heed the dream. Instead of pursuing the dream, he only considers it as one of the many dreams in his life.
I told the conclusion of this book to my friend, before I finished explaining, he first asked, “Then what is the difference between that man and the refugees who beat him?”
Of course different.
Because he was chasing his dream. A dream that anyone would consider impossible, but he continued to believe until the last page of this book.
He got it.
