An interesting book. I read this largely as an allegory about how the majority of us lack motivation to achieve our goals in life. The story follows the sojourn of a young shepherd boy as he seeks to discern the meaning of his recurrent dreams about finding treasure at the Egyptian pyramids. This leads him on a convoluted, multi-year journey, from the Iberian Peninsula through the Sahara Desert. At the end, he discovers that the physical treasure he sought was back at home, he only needed to encounter a certain messenger in Egypt to finally come to this realization.

The boy's father suggests in the beginning of the book that humans are inclined to find difference and/or foreign places attractive for vacationing. What one person perceives as the mundane and ordinary, another will see as alluring. Herein lies the common saying among Americans who vacation at the beach: "I wish I lived at the beach!" However, if they were to live at the beach, they would find hurricane season, barren winters, and off-seasons not so much to their liking. This is one small insight that Coelho offers, but one that does not strike me as especially profound.

There is also a spiritual dimension to this book that seems a bit vague. In some sense, Coelho has the "Alchemist" and the young boy argue for a heterodox outlook on the world we inhabit, one that defies the explanations of any single religion. His characters talk about the "creator" and the "Soul of the World" in areligious terms. While Islam and Christianity figure prominently in the background of this novel, the principle characters are rather agnostic toward established religion. But, at the core, there are two lessons Coelho is trying to impart to readers—have faith in both your own ability and the realization of things not yet accomplished and to understand that the "process" is all part of the overall accomplishment of an objective in life. On the latter note, Coelho is more directly communicating a life lesson that authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald merely imply—being "handed something" without putting forth the effort to accomplish it renders the human experience rather meaningless.

There is another tension in this book between the existence of free will and the determinism of fate. This is where I think Coelho is less persuasive, or at least, less clear about what he perceives as the guiding forces of our lives. A character comments early in the book that the "greatest lie" is that "that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate." Yet as we see later in the novel, the young boy seems to become guided by fate. Yet, another character offers this advice later: "When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision." Here we see that our lives are not controlled by fate, yet our "free will" to make an initial decision becomes a sort of determinative force in our lives nonetheless. Coelho is striking the prototypical Christian balance between "free will" and "predestination" in the Old and New Testaments. At the same time, though, the young boy is told repeatedly that all people must seek their "Personal Legend," as though this specific endpoint is predetermined for people if only they take the time to discern what it is.

There are also pieces here in the novel about what we might call "tolerance" for difference, and an expression of how humans occupy one world and must unite. These are less expressed in the novel, but are still informative of Coelho's outlook here, I think.

I don't think this book is for everyone, and I can certainly see why it has an appeal among professional athletes like LeBron James (If I remember correctly, he noted this was one of his favorite books), because Coelho is really emphasizing that life is a series of trials that individuals must screw up the courage to face and overcome to achieve their destiny. However, I think it has broader appeal to almost anyone who has a definable goal in their life.