The Alchemist: Reviews by 2021 Reading Challengers

[Winter, Group Reads]

Tell us what you thought of the book! You can leave your review here. Even if you read the book outside of the group, please feel free to let us know what you thought of it.

Please make sure to mark your spoilers by typing "[spoiler]" at the start and [/spoiler] at the end but replacing the []s with <>s.

[Karin]

Since I read this in the past couple of years, here is my review

[BookishlyWise]

I read this book long back, I still believe this was a westernized version of very ancient Indian philosophies around romanticism. If you watch some of the cheesier Bollywood movies, you'll see what I mean. The book is well written in the sense that the writing is simple and it flows, but it's simplest of the simplest self help books. I sincerely believe if this was written by anyone else, we wouldn't even be talking about this one.

[SarahKat, Buddy Reads]

2.5 stars. I happened to listen to this on audio because we needed a book to start coming back from a long road trip. I wish I had read it with my eyes because my son kept talking over it because it was boring him. However, even when he wasn't talking over it, it was boring me a little too.

I really liked the feel of the beginning of the book. Very introspective and it seemed like I might be in for a Siddhartha-esque philosophical journey. There were some good one-off quotes, but the story as a whole fell flat for me. I'm someone who hasn't really had major "dreams" in my life. Ever. I want my legacy to just help people through my job or my personal life, but mostly making my kids be who they want to be. I'm happy living a small, unimportant life. So I am not really the intended audience here. And that would be fine, except a lot of what Coelho states in this book is that people like me suck. I posit that the world needs dreamers, but it also needs realists, and those somewhere in the middle. If everyone buggered off to Egypt every time they had a dream or a funny old man told them to, the world would fall apart because no one would be working at Walmart at 10pm when I need tylenol for my daughter.

[Marie]

I'm not sure what all the fuss was about. Maybe it was revolutionary written it was written?? Sadly, I found it dull. I'm still glad that I read it because I had heard about it for so long, but I wouldn't recommend it. Would love to hear from others who enjoyed it, though, because I would like to see the good sides of it. 😀

[Elina]

Everyone was talking about this book in the early 2000s, the hype was so big that I never felt like reading the book :). I finally read it last year, and I wasn't really impressed. Maybe I don't have room left in my heart for this kind of style after reading The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

[Debra Diggs]

This really wasn't my cup tea. I had it on my TBR list, voted for it, and now I know. I did not like the writing style. It was too simplistic. And did not cover anything new.

[John]

3 out of 5.

It's a book that appealed best to Type-A personalities in the 1990s, when "the universe gives everything to people that try the hardest" was more believable. These days, it's a slightly shallow parable that's most effective if you already believe it. Well-written enough, with its spare yet poetic voice, but little else.

Full review.