Atlas Shrugged

Ah yes, many of the actionteam members have heard my comments of that one. It all starts with the whole book queue theory I used to live by. What I mean is that I used to put books in queue as I received them. I think I started this a long time ago to force myself to read all my books. To enforce this I would not change the order of the books in queue. Needless to say, this would often lead to a book at the front of the queue preventing me from reading for periods of time. So what ended up happening? Well Atlas Shrugged put a big hairy stick in my front spokes. I didn’t read for 18 months; my longest dry spell of reading ever. Jon, being the avid reader that he is, harassed me so bad I finally gave up on the queue theory. So, I set aside Atlas Shrugged for a while. I tried on many occasions to start into it and failed for a long time. Finally at my last job, I got so bored, I plowed through dozens of books while working there. Long story, I'll explain another day. Anyway, after a while I gave Atlas Shrugged a try. Even with upwards of six hours of reading a day, that beast took quite some time to complete. It is definitely a long book.

Without further ado, here are my thoughts on the book: Okay, I liked her writing structure, descriptive verbage, and general story telling skills. However, the characters in the book drove me absolutely up the wall. The unintentional antagonists in the book, aka liberal socialists, were absolute idiots. The protagonists, aka conservative entrepreneurs, were just too ridiculously opposite of the antagonists. The whole book just had an air of McCarthyism I just could not get past. As I researched more into it, it seemed more evident that there was some truth to this conclusion. Ayn Rand came out of the Soviet Union as an immigrant and had an obvious need to tear the most hated soviet regime a new asshole with her writing. Now some of her ideology I do agree with, a lot of it I find fallacious. I mean in a perfect world where all people with money can and will act for the greater good by working at maximum competition/efficiency and in a totally perfect capitalistic model. However as we see with the whole corporate scandals that are so prevalent now, I find her ideology definitely dated to the 50s at a time where such white washing of corporate and indivualistic greed was the status quo. The worst part of the book had to be the 60 page monologue where Riordan (sp?) is making his speech to the people. Dear god I got 15 pages in and wanted to cry. It was the same rhetoric that had been thrown around throughout the entire book, just lumped into one long ass repetitive monologue. Overall, I though, without the serious character flaws in every person in the story, and the country for that matter, the entire premise of the plot would unravel. There is some truth within the book; I just think she took it so far to the extreme I felt like I was talking with Rush Limbaugh the whole time. The ideas were just too centered on a perfect system that can not exist. The problem lies in that relying on perfect, infallible people. Its funny, in my speaking with other people about this book, either people love the book, or they hate it. The novel has the effect of being very polar and galvanizing to most people; it just depends on what side you are on. Do I regret reading it? No. I mean it was very interesting from a lot of stand points and had some really good points to it, but it was defiantly a bit tough to swallow some of the themes and ideologies. One thing that can be said about the book: It did set the stage for the rise to the Libertarian party. It seems to have a strong influence among certain groups. In some ways she did predict the demise of the Labor unions too. I also think she could have compressed the book down to about 500-600 pages and had the same effect to come off as being so long winded. I don’t know it seemed almost like born-again Christianity for entrepreneurship.

Sorry all for the huge comments on a topic already beat to death be me 18 months ago.

D>M>

BTW I calculated approximately how many pages I read during the 'slow' period at my work: 7900 pages in about 6 months. Most of that was at work or in public transportation.