"The Alchemist" By Paulo Coelho

The Alchemist was recommended to me by an employee at Barnes & Noble after I asked the name of the man who wrote The Celestine Prophecy. He said if I liked insightful books I would love The Alchemist. So I bought it. I was, however, slightly disappointed. The book was okay. It definitely presented some interesting ideas, but they didn't get me anywhere near as excited as The Celestine Prophecy.

Here are some of the lines that I found interesting:

"'I've crossed these sands many times,' said one of the camel drivers one night. 'But the desert is so huge, and the horizons so distant, that they make a person feel small, and as if he should remain silent.'"

"'We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.'"

"'Everything on earth is being continuously transformed, because the earth is alive...and it has a soul. We are part of that soul, so we rarely recognize that it is working for us.'"

The day before I finished this book sometime last week, Christina and I were lying on my trampoline reading. I had just read a passage in my book about a man whose camel had to carry his books and him, when I said "Can you imagine how many books you would have to take if you had to cross the Sahara? I'd have to take a whole 'nother camel!"

"At least," Christina replied without looking up from her book.

I continued to ponder which books I would take with me, then decided that I would have to spend at least two days in Barnes & Noble picking them out.