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 don’t know. She sucks you in with the atrocious writing and two dimensional characters who are all just stand-ins for an opinionated author, but she really seals the deal with the fetishization of rape culture and how it inexorably ties in with hyper-capitalist American culture. It’s really the whole package.
I can't defend any of that, and I'm ashamed to say, that crap worked on me for a bit as a man barely a boy, in the 90s. What helped me was looking at other movements like scientology and Charles Manson.
Just trying to say, don't throw someone in the trash just because they read trash.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
Fountainhead worked on me a bit. I still think integrity and innovation are important, but I bet I would have gotten that way even if I hadn't read it.
I don't make weapons, I don't work for Twatter or Faceboot, I do make an effort to keep refining and upgrading designs instead of endlessly recycling the old, I do pull out dead useless code. I don't win every battle and I don't even fight every battle. And very generally speaking I do think if you do work you are proud of you will be happier.
At the same time you should not assume you are the smartest person and if everyone is doing X you need to at least consider that they are on to something.
See? You don't need a 400 page novel. A paragraph works.
Yeah, honestly, I don’t mind reading novels that argue points I disagree with, but the repetitiveness is unbelievable. One of the reasons John Galt’s 60 page speech is so intolerable is that all of the points he makes in it had already been made two or three times before.
Does he actually have a speech, that lasts 60 God damn pages?
Yes. And I really hope whoever shelled out cash to see the Atlas Shrugged 3 movie had to sit through every agonizing second of it on screen.
I just think it's fascinating that racists can write. Like, good for them.
"This book is a testament to how even the most stupid among us can write a fully fledged book with words, chapters, and everything." ~@tea
I struggle to see how anyone could have written the Turner Diaries and not have either been trolling or gotten some serious "Are we the baddies?" Energy in the process....
"This author deserves to die on welfare"
Reading Atlas Shrugged is more like a hazing ritual conservatives inflict on each other.
I look back and my parents let me read this in high school without comment...like wtf mom and dad.
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.
The audiobook isn't so bad. It's certainly 64hrs of audio... And took me 3 months.
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.
I have to be in the minority of sane people who enjoyed this book.
To be fair, I had no context and read the first 10 pages assuming it was satire. The rest of the experience was bizarre. In the first chapter the main character ignores the advice of the train employees and orders the train to run despite the signal being red. It's touted as taking responsibility when none else would. Utterly insane to me that someone who had been out of the area for decades, making management level decisions, would decide they know better than the worker on the ground who does the job daily. The contempt and arrogance leading to destruction - a great critique of management structure and survivor bias. How is it not satire?
Through the looking glass with a self important free capitalist narcissist, with almost no experience of the world and commerce outside their bubble, self hating tirade against perceived inability. Fascinating stuff
I remember reading The Foundtainhead and, when I finished I realized what a lousy, shitty philosopher Ayn Rand was.
And that all my architect friends had terrible egos.
Is that where Ted's ego came from in HIMYM? I thought it was just Ted, but maybe all architects are horrible?
That explains a lot about Frank Gehry. That and a complete lack of aesthetic sensibilities.
I still cannot believe a novel this terrible inspired a successful movement that was thoroughly endorsed by presidents.
If I had a time machine I would go back in time and publish it, but make sure that it only had a limited release. Never got super big just big enough so that some people had heard of it, and then I would sue Ayn Rand when she published her version. Win easily and announce that I wrote it as a parody, mocking people who think that being overly self reliant and rejecting community is a good way to live, for they are like house cats.. overly dependent on others yet thoroughly convinced of their own independence. "As Ms. Rand demonstrated by stealing my book and claiming it as her own."
Then I'd put a time capsule with the fucking source code to Bioshock 1, 2, and Infinite somewhere to preserve those games in the timeline.
The damage that book has done to this world...
Win easily and announce that I wrote it as a parody, mocking people
Then watch it backfire horribly. Conservatives (including those who call themselves libertarian) are blind to satire. You might remember that the_donald was satirical at the start. So was the game Monopoly.
The amount of people with both the patience to read it and the inability to tell that it is describing a fantasy land with magic and wizards is worrying.
Since everyone else is talking about Ayn, let me tell you about Dorothy Parker.
You know that movie, "A Star Is Born?" She wrote the original version. She was a famous writer, known for her devastating insults. She was also an early Anti-Fascist and supporter of Martin Luther King, JR.
Totally underappreciated and far more deserving of fame than Ms. Rand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Parker
And one of the greatest wits of American history. She deserves to be up there with Twain.
If nothing else, she should be remembered for all time for coming up with the phrase "what fresh hell is this?"
Dorothy Parker was once asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence. “You can lead a horticulture,” she replied, “but you can't make her think.”
I'm the person who basically never throws a book away (I did once, but I bought a replacement after the old version literally broke apart in several places). But I would light a chimney with "Atlas shrugged", if only to prevent it from falling in gullible hands.
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.
Competition is a great idea to these bozos until they realize that it's possible for them to lose.
I wanted to read this book so I could see what the fuss was all about. I’ve never made it 80% of the way through any other book and then intentionally stopped reading it. Everything about the way it is written is so bad. The characters are all made of cardboard. The situations that arise make no sense. Pretty much everything about the book makes no sense and is just to drive the story towards whatever idiotic conclusion Rand wanted.
When John Galt finally appeared and I realized he was just three incoherent speeches in a trench coat and not an actual attempt at writing a character, I basically abandoned finishing the book in disgust.
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.
tbh I thought that was Tilda Swinton
Pure poetry!
what book would be the opposite of AS
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.)
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