After having just finished The Fountainhead, I couldn't wait to get started on on Atlas Shrugged. At 1,168 pages, it'll take me most of March (and into April) to read, and that's with an aggressive reading schedule. The only copy the library has was hardcover which makes it more of challenge to lug it around with me.
The Fountainhead easily breaks into my top 20 favorite books I've read; possibly top 10. Rand's writing reminds some of Sinclair Lewis which is odd because it doesn't appear he was an influence on her. Like Lewis did in his novels, Rand worked her message into the novel. I still am not really sure what Objectivism is and all the Wikipedia definition did was make me feel like a college freshman again; confused and thinking of when happy hour starts. Whatever it is, it makes for great reading. I have a feeling that Howard Roark's testimony at the end of The Fountainhead is really Rand defining what Objectivism is. An excerpt:
Nothing is given to man on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways - by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary.
The creator's concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite's concern is the conquest of men
The creator lives for his work. He needs no other men. His primary goal is within himself. The parasite lives second-hand. He needs others. Others become his prime motive.
Howard Roark
from The Fountainhead
Again, maybe that's not the epitome of Objectivism, but it's a great passage. Now that I know the difference between creators and second-handers, I see people differently already.
Brian,
I have read The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and Anthem .... when I first read her stuff I thought it was great. That was until I started to read stuff from James Clavell's King Rat, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and Hugo's Les Miserables and I have to say Rand is in no where near these intellectual giants. I mean she is good but for the amount of reading I did the a scant short story from Hemingway - A Clean, Well-Lighted Place is so much better.
Well thats just me.
Anna Karenina is on my reading list this year. I hope to read more Dostoyevsky too.
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