3 ms·

We read Anthem freshman year. It's been a long time, but that seems like a good piece of fiction that covers similar themes without getting bogged down in plot

• matwood 10y ago
  Speaking of her other books, I found The Fountainhead to be a much better story with less preaching than Atlas Shrugged. The ideas I took from it were to work hard, and expect to be compensated for your efforts. The lead character was also very much an idealist, doing things the 'right' way in his mind and going through periods of wealth and poverty because of it.
  • sevensor 10y ago
    Even better, read We the Living. Rand is at her best as a critic of Soviet Communism, the system under which she came of age. Despite her stated love for the United States and its economic system, I don't think she ever really understood it at the level she understood Soviet Communism. This is why her novels set in the U.S. don't really feel like any version of the U.S. you know of, historical or current. It's not so much the real United States as it is an idealized not-the-Soviet-Union. Maybe it's a place you want to live, and maybe it's not.
    • dragonwriter 10y ago
      > Rand is at her best as a critic of Soviet Communism Huh. The idea of Rand as kind of a weird mirror image of Marx, much better as a critic of a particular system than a prescriber of solutions (though, even with his problems in this regard, Marx is much better than Rand here), is interesting.