Atlas Shrugged

What can I say? I hated this book. Hated it. Towards the end, I felt like Frodo Baggins; like Atlas Shrugged was my Ring, my burden. By Part III, it was like I was trudging through Mordor, every step more difficult than the last but knowing that I would not give up, that I had come too far to be beaten now. And in the end, I made it to Mount Doom... and I would love to have dropped this book into its fires. I understand that this is her manifesto, the culmination of her philosophical point of view. But its a crappy book, shoddily written. Rand's heroes are the greatest, most moral people in the world. Everyone else is stupid, lazy, or spineless, usually a mixture of all three. Her characters each seem to have their own soapboxes that they preach from. I've never read so many monologues in my life. The story finally gets good in the last few chapters but you have to go through 1,000 pages of drivel to get to it. Don't waste your time.

There have been three low-budget films based the novel, the first two of which, which cover parts I and II respectively, I had watched before I read the novel. If ever there was a case in which the film is better than the source novel, this is it. Which is saying a lot since the films are not very good, either, but certainly are more tolerable than this torture.