The Alchemist, Paolo Coelho
...didn't change my life but having referred somebody else to read it, it did.

It's a book about destiny and encourages you to act on signs to realise your destiny...I was on holiday on a boat sailing through the dalmation Islands summer of 2005 with 8 people including a friend who I sahll call R - having read the book and liked it I told her to read it - she was in one of those 'should I, shouldn't I' situations having met a guy one week previously in a bar in Germany - their eyes met, she felt a connection, they talked, spent the night and went their seperate ways - however there was enough to suggest that in some ways their meeting was fate, she had initially asked him to pretend to be her boyfriend to ward off an unwanted male admirer and their night started from there....anyway, she was agonising - she felt the connection but never got round to asking him...the added complication was she was living in Australia, he in Europe - would it ever work...

Anyway, the book convinced her to act on the signs and last year she realised her destiny by marrying her now husband.

If you are in a similar quandry, I suggest you read it...
(zit, Fri 16 May 2008, 1:57, 1 reply)

have to disagree with you there
I went through the complete Coelho canon on my trip through magical realism and the latin american sub-pop-genre.

My tittyfucking Christ what god awful self congratulatory quasi-mystical tripe; I mean the Alchemist is spectacularly meaningless and limp, but at least it has the decency to be clearly allegorical and best of all, only about 2 eye bleeding hours short. The rest of them, getting deliberately more mawkish, lightweight and knowing as they go on are just the most terrible waste of paper this side of the Daily Mail. And don't get me started on Gabriel Garcia Marquez... all of the above, only longer.

I heartily concur with many of the other posters' dismay at 'zen and the art of whining about your breakdown'... some books seem to offer you a gold plated ladder to enlightment, when all you really need to do is stand up and walk there.

(and that one with the young hooker... christ, all the intellectual depth of Pretty woman, without the textual mastery and multidimensional characters).

Glad your friend married someone she shagged on holiday, though. Fuck me, that's never happened to anyone before... must have been destiny, or something.
(pounana Slept well, and dreamed of large women, on, Sun 18 May 2008, 15:33, closed)