As a simple story, this book is fun and enjoyable - the scenes are well-drawn, the personalities strong and interesting, the plot easy to follow and intriguing if not exactly gripping. As a work of philosophy, I found it a little trite and simplistic; and what is worse, the cliches contained here are cloaked as earth-shakingly profound ideas. After all, everyone agrees that following one’s dreams is a good thing to do. Everyone knows that you can gather insight about the future through clues in the present and the past. This book presents such concepts as though they are a special secret that only a few of us can really understand, when in fact they are essentially universal.

All that said, I can appreciate this book as a protest against modernity, which is essentially what it is. It is true that many of us get distracted from our dreams by more pressing and practical concerns, and that the pressure of modern life, the constraints of a purportedly free society, etc., make it difficult to pursue our true passion. And it is also true that too many of us can’t see the forest for the trees, as it were, in our lives. It is heartening, in a way, that this book has been picked up by so many people - in the sense that this simple protest has attracted a large following.