Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Book Rating: 2 of 5

Atlas Shrugged is a controversial book. Ayn Rand appears to be a controversial personality.

Its difficult to separate the political opinions from the novel when reading Atlas Shrugged. And its difficult not to read it and view it with your own preconceived biases.

Clearly Ayn Rand wrote Atlas shrugged to make a political point. She had ideas about the world and wanted to market those ideas. Its my impression that some of Ayn’s ideas were clearly wrong and some maybe correct.

Atlas shrugged is a heavy book, I think it weighs in around 1100 pages. It can be a boring read because and there’s a lot of repetitive sections. Characters are given long monologs where they expouse Ayn Rands political and economic ideologies. These sections feel heavy handed and their intention is pretty well laid out in the narrative of the book. I them found very boring and they should have been heavily edited out. There’s a 60 odd page section near the end of the book where John Galt talks through the “philosophy of Any Rand” which I believe is called Objectivism. I found the discussion so objectively boring that I skipped it after 5 or 10 pages.

Despite my complaints I do think reading Atlas Shrugged affected my world view. There’s some truth to Characters like Orren Boyle a industrialist who abuses the rule of law to steal from his competitors. I also believe some people are great creators and our society can repress them. Its easy for government to have one intention but achieve the opposite outcome. Atlas shrugged made me more sympathetic to the idea of the freedom of the individual and that we shouldn’t feel compelled to help anyone else out of altruism. Ayn’s emphasis on individual accountability was also something I agreed with. Too often people blame things external to themselves when they don’t meet their expectations. Maybe your expectations are wrong?

The content of the Novel itself is ok. It could use a lot of editing. If you paired it down to 500 pages it would probably still be too long, but it would be a better novel and I don’t think it would lose its impact. Its characters are a mixed bag. Dagny Taggart is clearly Ayn’s fantasy for herself. Its clear to me that Ayn Rand was a unique woman and Dagny exposes this. Its fun to explore Ayns fantasy through Dagny. Spoiler: it involves a surprising amount of intense sex with powerful men. Only Eddie Willers and the “The Wet Nurse” I found sort of likeable. Most of the industrialists at Gaults Gultch I found to be arrogant assholes.

A lot of the technology of the book feels very dated. It was written in the 1950’s but I don’t feel like Ayn was that creative about what the future would hold. She spends a lot of time with steel, trains and oil. But overlooked ideas around communication, electronics and information. The nuclear age that was spawning around her is completely ignored. No one in her future watches a TV. Atlas Shrugged is a surprisingly regressive piece of science fiction and not particularly imaginative.

Should you read Atlas shrugged? I don’t know, probably not. I’ve given it a 2/5 for this reason. I’m surprised at the number of political people its impacted. Maybe they’re just not imaginative enough to be inspired by a better book? Word-by-word Atlas Shrugged is a easy novel to read and its story not particularly complex. So you can read it rather quickly despite its Bible’ish length. If it was a hard book to read I’d give it a 1/5 - strong avoid. But if you read it quickly there’s some things that can be enjoyed. Making it not a total waste.