Man, someone put up “Atlas Shrugged” and “Fountainhead” in my Buy Nothing Group and like six different people piped up to talk about how much they love these books and still have dog-eared copies they like to thumb through fondly 🥴
I really like that Adam curtis thing where he explains that she’s almost single handedly responsible for the terrible zeitgeist we currently experience
i have fond memories of the fountainhead because i read it at peak selfishness (16) and was both attracted and repelled by it. finishing felt like a wrestling match between my better instincts and the author. so i like remembering my resistant adolescent self, but i never read it again.
I had a funny experience with The Fountainhead of only realizing that the architecture critic I was enjoying was the villain well into the book. It was long ago - the main thing I remember at this point is that the protagonist raped a woman, and Rand framed this as good. Ugh.
i read fountainhead in uni after a friend recommended it (he as an architect major and told me it was based on frank lloyd wright, beloved son of wisconsin). i recall thinking that the ending reveal really made no sense to me and now i know that i was correct.
I read these when I was 14 or 15, and the mediocrity of the writing, superficiality of the themes and ideas was striking even then. I didn’t know there was such a big “Ayn Rand is my personality and savior” crowd back then. It was genuinely shocking when I realized it. Just… “Those books? Really?”
“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.”
—Flannery O’Connor
