If you wanted to relate to the topic in the article you should have said Anthem. It gets most of Rand's ideas on collectivism into digestible form (which is su

If you wanted to relate to the topic in the article you should have said Anthem. It gets most of Rand's ideas on collectivism into digestible form (which is surprising, considering Rand might be one of the most long-winded writers I've read). I made it through that one, Atlas Shrugged, started on The Virtue of Selfishness and decided I'd had enough. While Anthem is easy enough, I couldn't suspend disbelief for Atlas Shrugged, and it just would not end. After reading it, I had no desire to read the Fountainhead...as I wasn't sure what else Rand could write that wasn't both new and contradictory to something she wrote down in Atlas Shrugged. To me, the whole thing felt like a religion than it did a philosophy, where the God was an amalgam of wealth, actualization, satisfaction, indulgence, personal growth, and whatever else Rand said was good. Is the book without any merit? Of course not. Can you get that merit somewhere else? Probably. My Feelings on Atlas Shrugged in Retrospect: WARNING SPOILER ALERT. I AM NOT JOHN GALT. Unbelievably perfect protagonists (your disbelief probably won't be suspended) battle for personal freedom by sticking it to a group of bumbling antagonists bent on taking their toys (read livelihood) away. Insert lots of dialog for the author to repeat what she wrote in her non-fiction pieces where stupid antagonists can't come up with decent comebacks from buddies of protagonists who don't ever seem to shut up. All the while another protagonist is constantly mentioned by everybody in the book, yet nobody knows who he is, but he's chilling underneath some kind of holographic forcefield in the mountains somewhere WHILE HIS BUDDY floats around on a pirate ship (wait, what time period are we in?) blowing up shipments of copper. The main characters are either trying to build a railroad or trying to drive fast trains while wearing simple, yet elegantly fitted clothing. All of this boils down to a speech that lasts a hundred pages and put me to sleep multiple times because anybody can see where the book is going from three miles away (it's a huge book, like 1200 pages or something). The ending flips from some film noir type scene to something out of the Twilight Zone and I could no longer stay interested.