I’m with you. I tried, I tried to read it and it was just such a terribly written book I couldn’t make it through. Hell, the philosophy was bad, sure, but so was the plot, the characters, the overall story, well, everything about it was terrible. I haven’t the slightest clue how it got to be so widely read. Perhaps word is out that it makes a great doorstop?
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When I first started reading Heinlein, I had already been exposed to Frank Herbert and, by osmosis, general semantics. Heinlein’s work shows broad interests and mentalities that change over time. In this way his books have a dialogue with each other, Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers are usually given as examples of Heinlein’s shifting ideas and opinions. Heinlein was also an encouraging patron of Phillip K. Dick and promoted science fiction in general.
I’m of the opinion that Heinlein didn’t have an agenda to push, or at least not a clearly defined agenda. His late works are a fascinating portal into the mind of a man dying of an extremely painful condition, writing from habit and uncontrolled impulses. From this period we have the excruciatingly bad I Will Fear no Evil and the guilty pleasure but still a complete mess Friday. Here is an essay on Friday by the singularly great Jo Walton. The comments are fascinating, especially the dialogue between Jo and Charles Stross.
Anyway I think Ayn Rand was a very misguided author of pulp works, and the pervasive presence of her work in American high school curricula is alarming, to put it mildly.
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As I understand it Change.org may be owned by the owners of a Conservative polling company. If that is correct, consider what it might really be up to. Sorry,corrected (will be deleted later)
under the body of
Where comments generally go.
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oh yes. cstross did make a comment, I’m just a poor old man, my sight is dim, my eyes are poor, my nose is nackered.
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I don’t believe so, but I wasn’t aware of it being a for-profit company.
You may be referring to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/19/changeorg-michelle-rhee_n_1610760.html ? Forgive the source, it was the first link.
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I tried reading Atlas Shrugged as a high school freshman. I got through about page two and decided it was too much like the book of Numbers in the bible. Just constant repetition, one of the ultimates in tedium.
I don’t even faintly remember what I read, which is unusual in itself. I have excellent reading memory. If I read something in a book, I’ll remember a lot of the details forever, which made high school book reports very easy. I’m not a fast reader, but I’m a thorough one. If I don’t fully comprehend even a single sentence I keep going back and re-reading until I get it. And speed reading/reading at a “normal pace” is a lost cause. Skimming is exceedingly difficult and usually just leaves me confused.
But anyway, yeah, don’t remember a thing about it, other than I was bored to tears after a few minutes.
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