![]() I’ll show you all! And then they disappear into a crevasse that Google Maps will not show because the Google people are our kind of people, and a year later they come out and everyone who was ever mean to them will have starved. ![]() I’ll show you! the nerds imagine themselves crying. (This is, incidentally, where you can start your popcorn munching.) Indeed, the enduring popularity of Atlas Shrugged lies in the fact that it is nerd revenge porn - if you’re an nerd of an engineering-ish stripe who remembers all too well being slammed into your locker by a bunch of football dickheads, then the idea that people like you could make all those dickheads suffer by “going Galt” has a direct line to the pleasure centers of your brain. That said, it’s a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don’t get enough hugs. It’s no exaggeration when I say that Atlas Shrugged probably saved my sanity on that bus trip. The book would put me in a fugue state and when I looked up again from the pages, an entire state would have gone by. The way I handled the trip was to take Atlas Shrugged along for the ride, and when I was bored, to crack open the book and start reading. One of them decided to sit by me and I was treated to delightful stories of prison rape all the way through Iowa). This meant a 53-hour-long bus ride in the company of felons (no joke the bus stopped at Joliet and some rather skeevy-looking parolees from the prison got on. Basically, I find her storytelling restful, which I suppose isn’t a word used much to describe her technique, but which fits for how it works for me.Ī good way for me to describe how I relate to Atlas Shrugged is to note that one time when I was in college in Chicago, the only way for me to get back home to California for the Christmas holidays was to take a Greyhound bus. But if you’re in the mood not to work too much, it’s fine to have an author who points dramatically at the things she wants you to look at, and keeps the lights off the things she doesn’t. It’s not storytelling that works for everyone, and it doesn’t work for me with every book I read. Rand is an efficient storyteller that way: You know early on what the rules of her world are, she sticks with those rules, and you as the reader are on a rail all the way through the story. Her characters are cardboard but they’re consistent - the good guys are really good in the way Rand defines “good,” and everyone else save Eddie Willers and the picturesquely doomed Cherryl Brooks are obnoxious shitheels, so you don’t really have to worry about ambiguity getting in the way of your zooming through the pages. Even when she does, after the first reading of the book, you can go, “oh, yeah, screed,” and then just sort of skim forward and get to the parts with the train rides and motor boats and the rough sex and the collapse of civilization as Ayn Rand imagines it, which is all good clean fun. It has a propulsively potboilery pace so long as Ayn Rand’s not having one of her characters gout forth screeds in a sock-puppety fashion. I enjoy Atlas Shrugged quite a bit, and will re-read it every couple of years when I feel in the mood. I’ve mentioned it in passing before, but I’ll go a little more in detail about it now. That’s what I am to you people: cheap entertainment. I suspect this friend then went off to make herself some popcorn in preparation for the presumed inevitable mind-losing that will occur in the comments. In the wake of the “Objectivist Jerky” crack I made earlier in the week, I was asked by a friend of mine to share my thoughts on Atlas Shrugged with the general public.
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