At best, I tend to regard Ayn Rand as a sociopath, and yet I’ve read her ball-boiling pot-buster (and seemingly interminable) novel Atlas Shrugged.
Why I did so is a story worth a brief retelling.
Rest assured that I didn’t choose the novel for leisurely beachfront reading, or because of a fondness for its mentally unbalanced author, her bizarre message or the self-indulgent cult politics it spawned.
The plot is odd, too: Woman meets married man, falls for the metal he invented, and they don’t live happily ever after because her real spirit animal is another guy who is stopping the engine of the world to lead a rich dude’s revolution so that millions will be exploited in their second-rate inferiority, and in the process, somehow prove his narcissistic point via their degradation.
Rather, the reason I read Atlas Shrugged is that the late, great Bob Youngblood (he died in 2016), my English and literature teacher as a senior in high school, commanded me to re ......
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