Who has read Ayn Rand?

[edhopper]

I must say, I never read any of the novels in college. I read an essay about objectivism and thought it was such bullshit (first of all, what she describes is that a person should be subjective, not objective) that I saw no need to read anything else.
A friend who read Atlas Shrugged told me there was a 100 page plus speech in the middle, so I had no desire to slog through that.
I did see "The Fountain Head" with Cooper and Neal and thought he was completely wrong. As some one in commercial art, I understand the collaborative effort and know that I don't have final say on my work once I accept payment and the terms of the contract. (I do my own art for that). So Roark is a self obsessed dick.

If anyone here did get into her (I assume you got better) what was it that attracted you.

One more thing, I might understand why a college kid could get into it, but an older mature adult...what's with that?

Herman Hesse and Sartre on the other hand.....


On Edit:
It was Anthem I read.

[Adrahil]

1. I have. Terrible writer, worse "philosophy" NT

[lunatica]

63. I read it but was too bored to finish it

[Adrahil]

86. I read one novel in High School (assigned) and two more in college.

I read "Anthem" in high school as part of a class. BORING.

In college, I was struggling with my political identify. I'd come from a reasonably conservative upbringing, but as with many people, college introduced me to the idea of critical thinking.

I read The Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugs to try an find a philosophical foundation for ideas I supposedly believed in. Reading those pieces of junk helped me to reject these ideas completely.

[PDJane]

2. I started several of her books, never finished any of them.

Even at fourteen, I figured out that the woman was a complete nitwit, and she has a writing style that I just couldn't tolerate. It was sort of like reading my worst teacher over and over and over.

[HooptieWagon]

3. Same here.

Started AS, never finished. Terrible writer.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

51. Ditto. Horrible, boring writer. nt

[FSogol]

4. I did. I was a voracious reader and read most of her novels as a young teen. It didn't take me

long to find out she was full of shit. She thinks selfishness is good, ethics (aside from chasing the dollar) are evil, and that rape is the purest form of love. Her "best" novel is "We the Living" which tells of her escape from Russia to the West. She is so deranged and it is sad she never got help with her mental problems in life.

[JustAnotherGen]

6. I made it all the way through

Atlas Shrugged (my parent's copy) and then maybe a third of the way through The Fountain Head.

I read at a collegiate level at a young age - so my parents had to look for appropriate reading material that would challenge me.

I remember my dad giving it to me to read when I was about 10/11. And when I finished it him asking me - Okay. What's wrong with that woman?

The best lesson I learned from my father was to really pay attention and read what the worst people in America pay attention to, read, and believe. When you 'understand' them- you can fight them and beat them.

[dhill926]

38. good advice from your dad...

[ProfessorGAC]

53. Read It In HS

I thought it overwrought and turgid even as a kid.

A few years later, i actually fully realized what a load of nonsense it was, philosophically speaking.

Utter crap.

[Shrike47]

56. My story, too. Realized as early teenager this was awful writing, but finished AS and Fountainhead.

(I think). It got to be pretty hard slogging, even for a voracious reader.

[Archae]

7. Tried to.

Same effect Karl Marx had on me.

[CBGLuthier]

8. I have read all three of her fiction works.

Anthem is OK as a SF novelette, but mainly interesting as the source material for Rush's 2112.

The Fountainhead has a few points I like but its main character is a rapist and a thug who blows up a building because they fucked with his design to build shitty, utilitarian homes for the poor.

Atlas Shrugged is a piece of shit from beginning to end including a monologue that I think went on for 30 pages. She was a horrid selfish creature.

I was never at any time "into her." I am a voracious reader. Plus Patricia O'Neal was just stunning.

[MineralMan]

9. Her stuff is unreadable, and devoid of any reason to try.

And I have tried. As a rabid reader, I will read almost anything, but I have never been able to finish any book by Ayn Rand.

[JustAnotherGen]

10. I don't think I could finish

Atlas - now as an adult.

I believe that (just as examples) Fitzgerald, Walker, Doctorow - these writers could say more in one paragraph than she did in her entire body of work.

[malaise]

79. I have never been able to finish any book by Ayn Rand

Same here - and I finished Tolstoy's [b]War and Peace and Harris' Palace of the Peacock. I also loved Marx and finished Lenin's Imperialism.

[KatyMan]

11. I read her novels and some of a couple of her "philosophy" books

in my late teens, maybe 19 or 20. I liked certain things about her stuff at the time, but it really didn't take long to see through her. I enjoyed it as a discovery of something new, but the sheen wore off pretty quickly! And I read Atlas Shrugged probably twice, but always stopped reading it once the speech part came up.

[riderinthestorm]

12. I've read Atlas Shrugged and Anthem, not Fountainhead.

I'm a voracious reader and I read both of these while I was in high school.

I went through a phase where I was curious about why a book is considered a "classic" so I read Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamozov, Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice, The Last of the Mohicans etc. etc. etc. you get the drift.

I found that I didn't really like any of them (maybe Dostoevsky is an exception since he comes across as such a fellow curmudgeon and the Grand Inquisitor chapter is exquisite)....

I didn't really get into Ayn Rand's philosophy when I read the books, I was focused more on the ideas and how she got them across. What struck me the most about her writing is she's so heavy handed - there's no subtlety with her. While I'm not a great literary critic, even I could tell her style wasn't "literary" per se and that her books must be important because of her political theory and social structure ideas. I remember being pretty neutral about those because I was just too young to really understand them in a larger context.

Now of course, decades later, her theories are obviously ridiculous to me. Demonstrably proven as false, even more hypocritically when she took social security to survive....

[MohRokTah]

13. I read Atlas Shrugged as a teen ager and John Rogers describes it perfectly

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

[Bigmack]

14. "Ayn Rand's prime audience is ....

...adolescent males who have yet to experience their first non-self-induced orgasm."

I put quotation marks even though I'm not sure of the actual words. I picked this expression up from somebody here on DU.

[Iggo]

15. I tried to when I was a teenager.

Bored out of my skull. I don't think I got ten pages into it.

[Kablooie]

16. Got through the Atlas Shrugged audiobook.

I wasn't aware of her philosophy before listening to it. I thought it was pretty simpleminded.
Everything was exaggerated to the point of being a cartoon in order to make her philosophy work. Kind of like Superman against Lex Luther.
The rich heroes had super human qualities and could fix any problem singlehandedly that no one else could manage. They also had super passionate sex that could never be felt by ordinary mortals.

At the time I wondered about all the anonymous little people who rode on the mighty trains and whose lives were completely manipulated by forces they had no effect on at all.
It was also pretty bizarre to see people who helped others being evil villains who had terrible endings as a result.

[sharp_stick]

17. Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead

I read both of these in high school and loved them. I thought they were genius and oh so highbrow at the time.

Then near the end of undergrad I went back to Atlas Shrugged and finished it again. I hated it, now that I had some more experience with literature and life I figured out what a hack Rand was. The writing that I once felt was highbrow was simply florid and just so full of self important shit that the books became unreadable.

This is the exact same reaction I had to Battlefield Earth and L. Ron Hubbard.

[Ron Obvious]

18. A "philosophy" for 13 year olds, I always thought.

Didn't come across it until my twenties and was fortunately mature enough then to see right through it. Couldn't finish any of the books.

[Squinch]

41. That was about when I read it, and it did speak to me then. It was during the time when

girls were still raised to be extreme people pleasers. It was the first thing that I ever read that said that was not a good thing, and it did affect the way I thought about that.

Beyond that, though, and from the perspective of actuated adults? Pure drivel.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

19. I tried, years ago.

I love to read. There are only a few books that I haven't been able to finish, but "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" are both on that very short list. She was a terrible writer.

[mike_c]

20. I read bunches of Rand during my misspent youth....

I agree with you. They tend to be more appealing to children than to adults.

[The Traveler]

21. High school

I thought her ideas intriguing and her writing style ponderous. Ugh.

But then in college I took a philosophy class. By the time my prof got around to shredding Objectivism, that demonstration was unnecessary (but still amusing). At that point, her ideas were no longer intriguing, but her writing was still horrid.

Trav

[Johonny]

22. Atlas Shrugged is like the bible in that you always meant to read it

but every time you sit down to do so you suddenly realize there are actual good interesting books you wouldn't be reading instead.

[rogerashton]

28. Well, I've read the Bible

most of it anyway, but not Ayn Rand. The Bible is MUCH more interesting.

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

23. I've read Terry Goodkind. Does that count?

Considering he writes Rand-esque fantasy novels where the protagonist slaughters people chanting anti-war slogans....

'course, I never finished the series, actually. It was kind of like other people who've read Ayn Rand and thought it was brilliant at first, then re-read it later and realized it was crap. I thought his first few books were amazing, and now I look back and think "What piles of crap".

[sweetloukillbot]

60. Funny comment on Goodkind from an author panel at Comicon

"I went through a Goodkind phase in high school. I'm not proud of it."
I read the blurbs comparing him to Rand and knew to stay the hell away...

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

61. Hah!

That's awesome. It did take me a few books to realize he was an idiot. A successful, published idiot, but an idiot nonetheless.

[Savannahmann]

24. I read it.

I've read many books that going in I knew I would not agree with the conclusion or point of view. The purpose of reading it is not to be converted, but to be conversant on the subject when debating those who disagree with you. We can't insist that people read Earth in the Balance or other works we think are important if we do not understand their point of view.

I am surprised, you would dismiss an author without reading it. Would you also have the books banned? Because that was what many of the RW tried to do and have succeeded from time to time over the years. I especially like that they banned Fahrenheit 451 which is a book about banning books. We can't talk to the RW and engage the people in debate that may well change their minds if we don't understand what they are talking about. When they reference Ayn Rand you can't just say oh, I read an article, and thought she was a loon and anyone who reads her is a loon. You have to know what it is that she is saying, and what it is she is trying to get across.

I've read the English Language Koran, I've read books on The Buddha, I've read the Bible, and I've read many other books that I disagreed with the conclusions or the point of view. But I've read them, so I can speak of them intelligently. I wasn't aware that our side now opposed reading or expanding knowledge of the individual. I normally associate that sort of behavior with the other side of the political debate.

I've also read Democracy in America. I've read the Naval war of 1812 by Theodore Roosevelt. I've read Mahan, I've read Sun Tzu, I've read the Little Red Book, and I've read Mein Kampf. I was more impressed with some books than others. I was more impressed with the thinking of some, than others. Reading should be a love of everyone. And you should not limit yourself to books that reinforce your beliefs. Read books that challenge your beliefs, because after those books your beliefs come out stronger, because they have been challenged. Then your beliefs are based upon factual and principled reasons.

[edhopper]

33. Wow

where the hell did you get that.
I said I read Anthem and felt the Rand was not worth a further investment of my time. Then asked for others experiences.
Where do I say they should be banned?
I am an atheist, yet more versed in the Bible than many religious people I know.
Really, where does this response come from?

[Boom Sound 416]

25. I had a crush on Dominique.

What can I say

[CanSocDem]

26. The first one I read...

...was The Virtue of Selfishness because I was a self-absorbed teenager and thought that I needed some intellectual gravitas to bolster that point of view. Then I read the one about the architect and identified with his sense of self worth. My redemption came when I brought up her name in the company of people much smarter than myself.

"Herman Hesse" was mentioned and I was off on a new crusade.


.

[truebluegreen]

27. "Slog" was exactly the term that came to mind.

I have always been a voracious reader, and always read to the end of whatever book it is, good or bad. In my mid-teens (?) I "slogged" through The Fountainhead, and quit on Atlas Shrugged.

It was simply too absurd (shrug).

[LWolf]

29. I read Atlas Shrugged 30 or so years ago.

That was my early 20s.

I didn't get into her. I'm just a voracious reader, and grew up reading everything in sight. My first impressions of that book? I could see why some people are such big fans. I was raised by fiercely independent working people who viewed taking charity in any form to be shameful; when things got hard, we stiffened our spines and endured. We worked for what we wanted.

I'm a huge proponent of independence and personal responsibility, so those elements struck a chord.

I'm an even bigger proponent of balance, and that happens when personal and collective responsibility are more or less equally joined.

I also value empathy, compassion, kindness, and generosity.

So, by the end of the book I wasn't a fan. I moved on and didn't look back.

I was reading Hesse in middle and high school...he was on my mother's book shelf. He's still on mine.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

30. She wrote "take me you brute" bodice rippers claiming to be philosophy.

She certainly wasn't a feminist with all of her "strong men" heroes.

[joeybee12]

31. I think most of us had during college years or thereabouts...

She's quite well known despite being criminally insane...you couldn't help but hear about her, so if nothing else, curiosity drew us to her pathetic, incoherent ramblings.

[politicat]

32. I did, in high school. I've re-read them occasionally as studies in lasting trauma.

But I started with We, the Living, which may be the least philosophical and most emotionally intimate, and probably the most autobiographical (or at least, most self-aware, in that Rand would have had something like Kira's life if she'd stayed). I knew enough about the Russian Revolution then to know that it was an incredibly disruptive time. Thus, I came to her other books aware on some level that she had been deeply traumatized, and that everything she wrote would be through the filter of her trauma.

I didn't hate The Fountainhead. I read that one at an age when I needed a model to help me be confident in my own abilities despite significant and pervasive voices telling me I was useless, incompetent, worthless (mostly because gender, also religion, also just general cultural assholery). (Having now seen several Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, Roark's self-delusion is much clearer.)

Atlas Shrugged is an excellent carbon sink and it's only utility is as feedstock for papercrete.

I do re-read them because they're an artifact of massive societal disruption as personal trauma. (I read Les Miserables with the same insight -- it's a chronicle of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars +25-40 years.) Trauma does engender self-protection/isolation, narcissism, distrust, empathy deficit, disconnection, workaholism, resentment, so seeing the intellectual artifact of that is useful for getting into that mindset and reverse-engineering ways out of it.


Edit: corrected a title.

[el_bryanto]

34. I read Atlas Shrugged

Thought it was interesting actually - i don't mind polemics. But when I sat back and thought about the ideas being expressed I got pretty annoyed. Particularly as it was suggested by someone who said that it would explain why liberalism is wrong-headed. If anything it had the opposite effect.

Bryant

[stevenleser]

35. Read Anthem, Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged several times each.

The stories are fun and interesting, but basically boil down to long winded apologia for greed.

Replace greed with any other sin or undesirable behavior and you can glorify them too and its understandable why some folks would gravitate to that. They want to feel better about the undesirable behavior. Her novels allows them to do that with greed.

"Greed is OK because we're unique, special people without whom industry wouldnt happen/progress/etc. oh yeah, and freedom." - that's really the entire premise of the books. The rest is filler.

One can imagine similar apologia for war/murder/violence, rape (in fact, Fountainhead contains rape apologia), pedophilia, you name it. Whatever socially/morally undesirable behavior can attempt to be excused by claiming individual exceptionalism.

[edhopper]

37. It's like the section of Siddhartha

where he gets involved with amassing money. But instead of showing the fruitlessness of it as Hesse does, she says that's the goal.

[edhopper]

36. Her philosophy would obviously be a disaster

in the real world. And I don't think citing Somalia is too far off.
Yet mature, supposedly intelligent adults embrace her.
What do he make of the likes of Greenspan, Paul and Ryan.

[AngryAmish]

39. I tried. I gave up.

Most philosophy is terrible writing. Except for doc Popper.

[octoberlib]

40. I read The Fountainhead in high school. A friend gave me his copy

and told me I had to read it, like it contained all the answers to the universe. Flannery O'Connor expresses my sentiments perfectly:

Flannery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand (1960)

In a letter dated May 31, 1960, Flannery O’Connor, the author best known for her classic story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (listen to her read the story here) penned a letter to her friend, the playwright Maryat Lee. It begins rather abruptly, likely because it’s responding to something Maryat said in a previous letter:

I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

http://www.openculture.com/2014/06/flannery-oconnor-friends-dont-let-friends-read-ayn-rand-1960.html

[Hoyt]

42. Dreary, boring tomes of right wing BS.

[madamesilverspurs]

43. Tried, back in the '70s.

But the more I read the more tedious the writing became. I love curling up with a good book, reading for pleasure. Reading Rand felt like I was being punished. I honestly don't even remember which book it was, only that I quit about a third of the way in.

[Generic Brad]

44. "Atlas Shrugged" was one of my economics text books in college

All I learned was to parrot Ayn Rand theories to get a passing grade in the class. I recognized it as complete and utter bullshit as I read it, but much of life involves grinning and bearing it. That was how I managed a B in that so-called Economics class.

[greatlaurel]

45. Not for very many pages. Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" is the antithesis of Rand's hateful spew.

There are so many wonderful books that to waste time on reading that sociopath's drivel is a crime.

Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" is another classic to counteract Rand's odes to pathology. Rand was a deeply disturbed human being who tragically never got help for her mental problems. Her writing is useful in detecting sociopaths. Anyone who promotes her books as a guide is clearly an incredibly selfish person. They should be avoided and not allowed into any position of power over other people.

[bettydavis]

46. I was an afrocentric college student into ayn rand in the 90s

if you can believe it. read all the novels. The theory of objectivism actually made more of an impression on me because I was flirting with atheism at that time. Objectivism rejects all mysticism and that was intriguing to me. (which is why all these bible thumping right wingers who claim her have always confused the hell out of me) Ayn Rand was a frickin lunatic for sure. A self contemptuous Nazi lover when it came down to it. But there is still some value in some of the ideas. Like anything you extract what you can of value and move on.

[hatrack]

47. Tried, failed . . .

She's amazingly awful - a writer of cosmic incompetence - as well as a venal sociopath. Kind of a twofer.

[Golden Raisin]

48. About 45 years ago in college.

Took me a very short time reading Rand to realize she was essentially all about me, me, me, me, me, ME --- and everyone else could go eff themselves, starve and then die in the streets.

[Puzzledtraveller]

49. The Fountainhead

I liked it.

[conservaphobe]

50. During my angsty libertarian phase a few years ago,

I read The Fountainhead and made it through a couple of chapters of Atlas Shrugged.

Reading about the virtues of selfishness while toiling away in an overnight, minimum wage hellhole was one of the darkest moments of my life.

[thelordofhell]

52. Officer Barbrady

[arcane1]

54. That speech alone marks the worst writing of the 20th century.

I read "Atlas" but I skimmed over much of that speech because it was just the same damn thing said in 1,000 barely different ways

Not to mention it's an absurd philosophy to begin with. The richer I am, the better person I am. Whatever I do to get richer is, by definition, a good thing, since getting rich is inherently good. Or something.

[Warpy]

55. "The Fountainhead" was her most accessible novel

and she wrote persuasively enough you could almost buy the premise if you didn't think anything through. Oh, the heroine was a complete screwball and it was impossible to build up any sympathy for any of the characters, especially for the hero who built ugly eyesores that happened to have good interiors. Just the vaguest questioning of the plot would turn the novel into farce, and that's what happened to me.

I slogged through "Atlas Shrugged," but I admit I only scanned the multipage polemics parading as conversation in that ponderous pile of horseshit. I got through that one trying to imagine a hungry and whiny toddler clinging to Taggart's pencil skirt, so much for the death of altruism.

I realized even at 16 that it was a badly written pile of crap. I also realized that men who had lived golden lives, born into rich families and starting on third base, would likely take it as the purest form of moral rectitude, and it seems I was right on that account.

People who don't live such charmed lives recognize what a pile of crap it is by the time they hit 30, if not long before.

My greatest hope is that the resurgence of interest in her novels will produce people who start asking the right questions. It's certain that only people born to considerable wealth and who do nothing are successful in these post Reagan days. It's equally certain that hard work and an abstemious lifestyle only net you a retirement lived in dismal poverty.

There is nothing innately superior about people who inherit money. There is nothing innately inferior in people who don't. This is what Rand missed completely, that and the fact that inherited money produces nothing but right wing idiots who laud her books without having read most of them.

[Paladin]

57. I read "Fountain" and "Shrugged" back in college, and even then I should have known better.

I regret every single moment I wasted on such vile, egotistical, money-grubbing, poorly written trash.

[Gormy Cuss]

58. I read Anthem as a class assignment. When I encounter a new author I like, I read everything

by that author within a year or two afterwords.

I never read another Rand book.

[Prophet 451]

59. I have

Her writing is atrocious. Her dialogue is wooden, her characters are totally unsympathetic, her sex scenes border on rape and her "philosophy" amounts to nothing more than sociopathic greed. The porn stories I write and sell are better written (and I'm no Shakespeare, I'm just a hack). You remember that old saying that conservative's are looking for a moral excuse for selfishness? That's Rand in a nutshell.

[Warren Stupidity]

62. I have: I thought it was dreadful and I was like 12.

One book was enough.

[Skidmore]

64. Her works were on our reading lists for book reports when we were

in high school and I started to read Atlas Shrugged and never made it all the way through that muck. Her works are excrutiatingly tedious in the same way that Kafka's Methamorphosis was tedious for me. I have never understood what was fascinating about her ideas nor why she inspires such a cultish following.

[Chan790]

74. While I love Kafka...

if one dislikes Kafka, it at-least has one saving grace that Ayn Rand never mastered:

Metamorphosis is barely 200 pages long.

[Skidmore]

75. I know, but ready Metamorphosis in its

entirety is something I have never accomplished. I just can't get through that book.

[edhopper]

65. Anybody

read Steve Ditko's Randian comics like Mr.A, very bizarre.

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[applegrove]

66. I tried to read both. Heard hollywood was reading the books.

Didn't know anything about objectivism. Had heard the titles. I tried. I couldn't get through a third of the Fountainhead.

[treestar]

67. I read almost everything and a few things by Nathanial Brandon (one of her followers who quit her)

Don't know why. I get these fascinations.

The novels were terrible. The essays at least made some interesting points. But in the end, they were refutable.

Nathanial Brandon was like many of her followers. Eventually they'd have a thought of their own and she would break with them.

[Starry Messenger]

68. This is as close as I've ever gotten-

[Warren DeMontague]

69. No thanks.

Self-indulgent twaddle.

[Quantess]

70. I read about 5 pages from a co-worker's book

She said it was a really good book. I did not know anything about Ayn Rand at the time, but after just a couple of pages, it became apparent that this was a trash novel, and a poorly written one. My co-worker has terrible taste in books, I decided.

She also liked to crack racist jokes and made racist comments.

[pipi_k]

71. "We The Living"...

It was horribly depressing and I had to force myself to finish it.

[bluedigger]

72. I read Atlas Shrugged when I was 14 or 15.

It was a struggle and I was very happy to be done with it. Never dreamed of reading any of her other tripe.

[Feron]

73. I read Atlas Shrugged in high school as an assignment.

It was for an English class and it was a choose a book and write a term paper on it type of deal. And if you chose Rand's book, then you were eligible for bonus points. Oddly enough, the teacher never came off as a Libertarian type.

Anyway that gave me an 'A' in the class which meant that I could skip the final per the teacher's rules.

That's the only good thing I'll ever say about Ayn Rand.

[oldandhappy]

76. Long long ago.

Made me squirm then. Makes me squirm to remember, smile.

[bunnies]

77. Ive read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

They were good for about the first 50 pages. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre.... way more my speed.

[scarletwoman]

78. Not I.

Can't imagine ever wanting to.

[Louisiana1976]

80. I read Atlas Shrugged approximately ten years ago. Didn't like it.

[prairierose]

81. I tried to read Atlas Shrugged....

didn't get very far. I read Hesse, Orwell, Twain , Shakespeare and Dickens as a kid and could not stomach Ayn Rand.

[SheilaT]

82. When I was 17

in 1965 as if that matters, an older friend passed "Atlas Shrugged" to me. I no longer recall if I read it all the way through, and I do not recall anything at all of the content, but I do clearly remember that it made no sense at all and was one of the stupidest books I'd ever read. I was too young, didn't know enough of the world to make any kind of coherent statement as to why it was so stupid, but ever since then I've not thought very much of anyone who thought it was a great book.

[Zorra]

83. Her novels are awful and not worth reading, but do have some value when used as kitty litter. nt

[2banon]

84. I read Fountain Head in my Senior year in H.S.

that was in 1968. My English teacher gave it to me as a personal gift. She thought I would enjoy it, after I gave a brief analysis on the controversial laws regarding possession of Marijuana.

After reading it, I found myself mystified as to why she thought I'd enjoy it. It only came to me recently as to the rationalization.

[Demonaut]

85. long before I was interested in politics I read her novels.....a waste of time

heard they were great....didn't even find mediocrity