Personally I love reading novels of worlds that have no basis in reality. I also love authors that repeat themselves over and over because I have memory issues and can’t remember the last sentence I’ve read.
Oh, and I also love reading novels of worlds that have no basis in reality.
I just think it’s fascinating that racists can write. Like, good for them.
Back when I was in junior high in the early 1980s, I found a copy of Atlas Shrugged on my father’s bookshelf, and started reading it. I can’t remember how far I got into it, but I do remember thinking it was just awful in just about every way: story, writing, pacing, everything.
I asked Dad about it, “Oh, that. It’s terrible, isn’t it?” A friend had given it to him. Neither one of us finished reading it and after that it ended up at a book reseller.
On the plus side, he’d gone through his books and gave me James Clavell’s Shogun to read, which was an awesome novel.I tried reading it twice and didn’t finish either time.
The only other book I struggled with was Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The travel-log sections were entertaining, and the relationship with his son was interesting, but the discussions on the nature of quality were completely lost on me.
I did get through Zen on the second attempt because I thought it was worth it. I saw no value in Atlas Shrugged at all.
Zen and the Art was a big deal for me. A journey to the state I wanted to leave. It made me love what I was giving up.
Was your father an English teacher? That’s how I ended up reading those books around that age. Add some Hesse and the Gulag Archipelago and we may be related.
Dad had an interesting career. Started as an office clerk for a railway with only high school education. Then he got into using an IBM 650 (IIRC) for doing freight rate calculations. How he managed that transition, I have no idea. He didn’t care for being cooped up all day flipping switches, dealing with punch cards and tapes.
He switched to marketing and got on there very well and retired after 37 years as a regional director.
He always has a book on the go, even now at 83. He has an eclectic pile of them that he kept, from Zane Grey to an early history of the Civil War written around 1870.
So interesting. I just read everything on the shelves. It was mostly confusing. Animal Farm is not like Charlotte’s Web.
100% 👍👍👍 the BBC did a great docu-series on Raynd. If you’re wondering what it is that you can’t quite put your finger on about her work, it’s that she’s utterly miserable. A person whose geat intellect can’t even make them joyful is a person whose intellect has turned against them.
In addition to her just being a miserable person, her actual composition is just awful. The following quote is a sentence:
“Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live–that productive work is the process by which man’s consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one’s purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one’s values–that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others–that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human–that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind’s full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay–that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live–that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road–that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up–that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only traveller you choose to share your journey and must be traveller going on their own power in the same direction.”
Reading Atlas Shrugged is more like a hazing ritual conservatives inflict on each other.
I dunno, when I was in high school there were a number of Ayn Rand essay contests with prize money.
I won’t say they’re good books but I did make good money from reading them.
You mean the ones that can read anything longer than a National Enquirer piece. There must be dozens of them!
Eh, it wasn’t bad as a revenge fantasy. You might like it if you enjoy thinking about how all the people who don’t appreciate you would be screwed if you just left. The political philosophy being proposed won’t be too offensive if you already lean libertarian.
My main objection to the book (other than the infamous speech, which I admit I couldn’t read all the way through) is that it’s a sort of morality play with with exaggerated good and bad and no shades of gray, but it keeps denying this and insisting that the real world really is that black and white. The reader ought to take it with more than a little pinch of salt.
Oh, and that Ayn Rand’s self-insert has a BDSM fetish I really would have preferred not to know about. (Why do authors keep inserting their kinks into books? I’m looking at you, Robert Jordan. And especially at you, Piers Anthony.)
My main objection i similar to our but broader in scope. None of the main characters feel like real people. They are Platonic Ideals of Ayn Rand’s fantasy lifestyle, full stop
That always annoys the shit out of me when not one well. It can be done well, but it takes a significantly better author.
I think author-kinks are a bit misrepresented (especially with Jordan, who I read more as commentary on power dynamics) but the point is not invalid at all.
You might like it if you enjoy thinking about how all the people who don’t appreciate you would be screwed if you just left.
I see you have read my dream journal.
You really can’t win. If you people are dependent on you it means more work if/when you take time off. If people don’t need you, they don’t need you and this world is just that colder.
So what’s up with this novel? Can’t find anything obvious about it - only that it’s mighty popular among conservatives (which is usually a red flag)
There are plenty of articles going into great detail- here is one- but essentially it is a showcase for Rand’s moronic and hateful Objectivist philosophy and it has such ludicrous ideas in it as suggesting railroads would do great if it wasn’t for the pesky government getting in their way and after society collapses, the brilliant industrialists will all live in paradise just as soon as we find a way to create electricity by violating the laws of physics.
For those who are already familiar, this cartoon summarizes the problem with Atlas Shrugged quite succinctly.
Even if they had robots they would still need to be tooled ;)
This would have been a welcome addition to the book.
It’s just one of those novels that many bookish 17-19 years have read. I think it is worth reading in the sense that I think reading the Bible is worth reading. It is popular enough that you sorta have to have some familiarity with it. Popular because it is popular at this point.
Basic setting is (I am going to steel man it) the world is falling apart from communism and the US is pretty much the last functional country. However instead of slowly drifting down like everyone expects suddenly the US is declining much faster. The reason is all the Jeff Bezoses are going on strike secretly.
The plot follows an heiress to a train company as she tries to hold things together and has an affair with one of her clients.
Eventually everything falls apart and the Jeff Bezoses launch a plan to rebuild but with a new rule that they are running everything.
The end.
what book would be the opposite of AS
edit: I guessed grapes of wrath, which was the pick of someone on a quora post on the topic - https://www.quora.com/What-book-might-be-considered-to-be-the-opposite-of-Ayn-Rand-author-s-Atlas-Shrugged
Illuminatus?
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test?
Pure poetry!
I am yet to read one actual criticism of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (or any of her other books) that’s about the content itself.
I bet most of you losers have not read any of it and just rely on what others have said…
Calling people losers before they even respond to you is not a good way to get them to give you the information you want.
