Review: Atlas Shrugged
Filed under Reviews on October 12, 2006
Keywords: Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, books, objectivism
It’s been a while since I read a 600+ page book that wasn’t written by Mr. Jordan. Ayn Rand’s Objectivism masterpiece Atlas Shrugged weighs in at 1074 pages. It took me over a month to read, and not just because it was long.
I knew from the start that this was a book with a message. Unlike Stranger in a Strange Land, however, I rarely felt preached at. Rand’s characters were more than just mouthpieces, and the expositional dialogue actually felt natural, for the most part.
There was one monologue towards the end of the book that ran for more than fifty pages. Rand launches full tilt into a discourse on objectivism, disguising it as a radio broadcast decrying the evils of the goverment and espousing how the speaker was saving the world. I found the content repetitive and could only labor through a couple pages at a time before having to set the book down.
While I liked the characters, story and premise–America becomes a socialist state along with the rest of the world and all her great capitalists/industrialists go “on strike” in an effort to stop the world’s “motor” and start anew–it reveals the flaw in objectivism, an extreme, capitalist worldview. Extreme views only appear rational when pitted against their extreme opposites. The antagonists of Atlas Shrugged are charicatures, though one or two of them are fleshed out a little, and their actions seemed unreal to me in the face of their predicament.
I think the next “classic” I’ll read is 100 Years of Solitude. There are some new, non-shared world genre releases I’m interested in as well, namely Naomi Novik’s Temeraire trilogy. Now, where did I leave the Amazon gift certificate I got for my birthday . . . .
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