The various threads about Ayn Rand have made me curious…
If you have read the book Atlas Shrugged, please choose one of the following:
A) I read the whole radio address at the end
B) I read part of the radio address and then gave up and skipped to the end
C) I skimmed the radio address
D) I skipped the radio address entirely, possibly having been forewarned
E) bonus: I read the radio address over and over and over, and even set it to music and sing it in the shower daily
For me the answer is “B”. I think I got about 3 pages into it, said “what the hell is this crap?” and paged forward until I found the end of the thing.
A, although I took a break before starting it because I was warned beforehand. I have a problem with skimming books or not finishing ones that I’ve started.
I read Atlas Shrugged when I was a teenager, and it made a huge impression on me. The radio address rocked my world at the time. I doubt that I could plow my way through it now, but to a moody adolescent atheist, it was riveting.
Somewhere between B and C. I read a page, thought “Good Lord, what is this?” and then skimmed until I got to the end. My friend told me to go back and read it because she thought it was the best part of the whole book, but I never took her advice on that. The recent posts on Rand has made me want to go back and read Atlas Shrugged again, just to see if I’ll have a different opinion now that it’s been four years.
B-to-C. Until my copy completely fell apart, I would open it randomly and sometimes revisit the speech. It’s basically an exercise in bashing the reader over the head, with 500 reps for tone and bulk.
A, leaning towards E. LIke pinkfreud, I read *Atlas Shrugged * as a teenager, and the concepts were new to me. It was the mid-sixties, and I found it fascinating enough to read more than once, trying to think through the implications. I reread it decades later when my kids were assigned it in school and skimmed unashamedly.
A, and not-quite-E. I read it when I was about 16, and the speech encapsulated a lot of the ideas that were swimming around in my head from reading the previous parts of the book. I thought it was fascinating, and a point of view that I had never really heard before expressed with such confidence.
I have since re-read the book several times and did actually wade through the whole radio address once, mainly to see whether she ever said anything new or simply recycled the same old theme. She doesn’t say anything new.
A. The first time I read AS, I read the whole thing through. I’ve reread it a few times since then, and I usually don’t read the entire radio address anymore.
A) – but I was a teenager then and had a much longer attention span than I do now.
I also read The Bible straight through as a kid – tiresome genealogies, head counts on the mass animal sacrifices, arcane building instructions for arks and temples, etc.
I skimmed the entire book. Rand had the amazing ability to tell a 300 page story in 3 times the amount of pages. She could have benefited from a good editor.
I was actually enjoying the book for it’s story while not really agreeing with the philosophy until I got to the speech. I don’t like skimming while reading as I feel it’s cheating but I just couldn’t make it. By the end of the speech I was only actually reading the one sentence per page that I deemed the important one.
Like HazelNutCoffee, I started reading the sermon at the end, then started skimming, and then skipped ahead. I was already pretty sick of her nonsense at that point, and had no tolerance for putting up with her beating a dead horse.
I was exceptionally disappointed upon reading that book, and I thought that it started out really interestingly. What utter drivel and nonsense.