Ayn Rand

[Staplegun]

Books
The Fountainhead
We the Living
Atlas Shrugged
Anthem

I've only read The Fountainhead and Anthem, but I really liked them. We the Living is sitting beside me, but i have yet to pick it up. Atlas Shrugged sat in my library for many years without me touching it because I thought it was a romance novel. (I'm really not sure what gave me that impression.) I read The Fountainhead for school and we were given like 5 weeks to finish it. I finished over the weekend. *Not* my kind of fiction, but it was definitely interesting and it gave me something to think about. I read Anthem just recently, and I preferred the story in it to the one in The Fountainhead, but I wish it had been longer (although perhaps not quite as long as The Fountainhead ^^)

Rand tends to write ideas not stories, so if you don't want to think about a book, this isn't the author for you. However, if you would like to learn about objectivism, these are the books for you

[bengrenell]

There are only so many 40 page monologues that I can bear. After The Fountainhead Ayn Rand went on a virtually unedited downhill slide  as far as I was concerned. Atlas Shrugged was the last book of hers that I was willing to trudge through. Plus there is only so much undisguised preaching I can take especially though not limited to philosophies that I don't buy into. Glad you are enjoying them though.

[Staplegun]

Atlas Shrugged was the only book she wrote after The Fountainhead. We the Living and Anthem came before The Fountainhead. They are much shorter and Anthem at least has no 40 page speech. It's only like 100 pages in total i think. Have you read that one? It had more of a 1984 or A Brave New World feel to it than her later books.

But I still love the beginning of The Fountainhead: Howard Roark laughed. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff.

[bengrenell]

It has been many decades since I read Rand. I clearly remember slogging through 1,200 pages of Atlas Shrugged complete with I-kid-you-not a character giving a 50 page speech outlining Rand's philosophy in excruciating detail near the end. It left a psychic scar that may have indeed clouded my judgment of anything else she may have written. Her me-me-me philosophy of social Darwinism is something I find repellent.

[Staplegun]

hahah yeah I haven't read Atlas Shrugged, but I have heard horror stories of the monologue in it.