Yesterday, I finished Atlas Shrugged
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At this point, I can only expound upon what I said last year: Ayn Rand now has the dubious title of “Singularly Worst Fiction Author I Have Ever Had the Misfortune of Reading”, displacing J.D. Salinger and his literary diarrhea
And just to make myself clear, no, I am not arguing with her philosophy, or her rightness/wrongness, or her predictions of the world, or anything of the sort. I am simply saying that the woman could not write a decent fictional story if her life depended on it.
But now I can say that yes, indeed, I have read that book from cover-to-cover, even including that interminable radio address… and that I will never pick it up again.
Now, if you will excuse me, I need to go scour out my brain with some good, old-fashioned monster-hunting… and some steel wool.
Good for you. Just don’t forget the lessons learned. The story was shit, the characters had all the depth of Obama’s resume, and the sex scenes were comparable to watching taffy being pulled by a machine.
But dammit if there were flashes of sheer brilliance in there.
Oh, no doubt – in fact, I would even go so far as to say that philosophically speaking, the vast majority of the book was sheer brilliance.
Which would have been great if it was nothing more than a philosophical thesis. Unfortunately for us, it was shoddily hidden under the shredded and hole-ridden guise of a “novel”… in the loosest definition of that term.
And, honestly, I was more impressed/surprised at how denigrating the sex scenes were, as opposed to their mechanical depiction – I honestly had no idea Rand was such a misogynist, and apparently I am not alone in that surprise.
I am so glad to see someone with the same opinion of Rand’s writing. I could not get a third of the way into this book. I even tried it in audiobook form. Put me to sleep every time. I’m going to have to go with a cliffs notes version. I want to understand the philosophy because I have a feeling it’s pretty close to my own, and I hear people talking about the book all the time but man, they should translate this into Arabic and use it in place of waterboarding. Only that would be considered torture.
If you want to learn the philosophy, but not suffer through the 1072 pages of crap, I would suggest that you flip through to the 50-page radio address given by John Galt, and read that through in its entirety. Skip all of the thousand other pages, skip all of the craptactular fiction and horrific characters, and just cut to the heart of the matter.
That said, the radio address still took me about a week to read through, even though it was only about as long as a short story itself, but it is the condensed, consolidated, and simplified moral of the book, for whatever it is worth.
And the best news is that after that, you will not need to suffer through the rest.
I normally read a couple of novels a week, but I’m not sure I’ll get through Atlas Shrugged–It is one of the worst books I’ve ever tried to read.
Unfortunately, I cannot even encourage you by saying “it is worth it” – I am not convinced it was. I mean, sure, you get to look deep into the mind of a remarkably intelligent philosopher, and learn a lot about her particularly poignant take on life… but you have to put up with her heinously atrocious writing at the same time.
Honestly, the only reason I finished is to be able to say I did. There is small satisfaction in that, though.
Congratulations on finishing it.
I bought the book, I’ve tried numerous times to start reading it, I just can’t bring myself to do it.
I have read other works of Rand, mostly because I enjoy the philosophy and such. But yeah, the fiction part is just what makes me fall asleep every time.
So maybe I’ll just do as you suggest… cut to the radio address and put the book on the shelf.
Now, I am not saying the radio address is easy – I forced myself to read at least five pages a day, and sometimes that was all I could barely stand. But it saves you from the rest of the gos-se surrounding it… which, believe me, is worth a lot!
That sounds so… encouraging.
I could tell you that it was full of rainbows and puppy-dogs and cute little bunnies… but then I would be no better than Our Glorious President
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