Is this worth reading? My girlfriend is pestering me to read it but I've heard Rand is not a good writer

Good if you're 14. Actual drivel if you're a thinking, somewhat developed individual. Anyone who claims to base their philosophy on a tautology and still can't properly state the less general form of that tautology that is supposed to ground its "objectivity" has to be either an idiot or a charlatan. Probably both. She did not understand Kant, whom she called "the most evil man in history." She didn't even understand Aristotle very well, and she idolized the man. Trash philosophy and mediocre prose for feeble or inchoate minds.

>She did not understand Kant
Expand on this
>She didn't even understand Aristotle very well
Expand on this
>Strawmans, strawmans everywhere
You make sweeping generalizations regarding the characteristics of any reader who would consider reading Rand or integrating her ideas. Your post has about as a much substance as vacuum without backing your claims with some evidence. Everything else is just your unsupported opinion.

You’ll be closer to her after reading it if she’s read it. Shared experience :)

this

rape and murder her

It's too long. It would have been better if it was more concise. 350 pages would do it. I blitzed it in 3 days when I was a teen.

Pretty rare to find a girl who likes this kind of thought.

Maybe read her essays instead. It's more to the point and she wasn't that great of a fiction writer. So just skip the fluff and get the theme right away with her essays.

Everything Alissa Rosenbaum wrote is bullshit and hypocrisy, stemming from a traumatic experience in her childhood (confiscation of her father pharmacy by the Soviets). She died in poverty after her sponsors stopped supporting her.

The liberal who lived of her husband and neetbux later

Why don‘t you read it so you can form your own opinion instead of imitate someone else‘s?

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I open at different places and always get the same two passages. Either there is a man giving his wife jewelry and she is rejecting it because how dare he give her such an expensive gift, or there is a man telling his brother that the unemployed are useless scum that deserve no welfare (I assume his brother asked him for some money.) I have tryed also reading frome the byginnng but it's somme bulskytt aboug h train so ias get abgtioi bored aaaa& quitt Since nobody on these stupid "ask a question about whether Atlas Shrugged is worth reading" threads ever answers the question as if they've read it, I can only assume this is a weakly simulated book that doesn't actually exist, or that the contents of the book actually turn its readers' brains into mush so that they cannot remember anything about having read the book, and probably that it's some kind of initiation into the lower ranks of scientology which then advances onward to some kind of socialist conspiracy to eliminate the supreme court using magnetically polarized elimination of nuanced thought.

>there is a man giving his wife jewelry and she is rejecting it because how dare he give her such an expensive gift
I'm guessing you're referring to James Taggart and Cherryl Brooks going from memory, but your description is poor enough that I'm not sure. Give me more to work with please.

>there is a man telling his brother that the unemployed are useless scum that deserve no welfare (I assume his brother asked him for some money.)
This has to be Hank Rearden and Philip Rearden. Hank attacks Philip for being a second-hander who is using his familial ties to score a job through nepotism rather than through merit. Philip doesn't apply himself to achieve anything, not even his own desires, and instead relies on the products of others to sustain him while biting the hand that feeds him. His unemployment is a consequence of him not applying himself; his employment status is not the target of Hank's attacks, but the principles that Philip follow that guide his actions are.

What do you want to know more specifically? I've read it once and listened to it as an audio book a few times.

So she attacks a two dimensional caricature in the dull spirit of the contemporary 2nd red scare. By rights shouldn't even be remembered. Embarrassing.

I understand strawmans are your bread and butter, but the obvious lack of effort in engaging is probably the most embarrassing part of these kinds of posts. Bitching about not getting answers in past threads, and then not asking questions when someone is very willing to do so for you undermines your opinion so much.

for starters, the writing is shit, the characters are shallow caricatures, and most dialogue borders on surreal

For instance, she says:
>The “phenomenal” world, said Kant, is not real: reality, as perceived by man’s mind, is a distortion.
This is a gross misrepresentation of Kant's position. Aside from Schopenhauer's fetishism of the first edition, Kant's most frequently stated position from the second edition of the First Critique onward is that the "thing-in-itself" is a regulative conception. It is used to circumscribe the proper bounds of empirical investigation, otherwise it is "quite empty." Kant thought that the only route to objective knowledge was experience situated within the universal subjective forms of perception, space and time. He did not think the phenomenal world was "not real," he correlated its existence with that of the subject. But I don't expect a cogent, reasonable response from you. Randians don't bother applying logic, they just like to talk about being logical. They tapdance and argue in bad faith until they come to the end of their finger-length ropes and then emotionally shriek that "You're being illogical!" or they'll disgorge the "premises" of her "philosophy" incessantly and call my posts "Kantian gibberish."

I should have prefaced with my not being the guy you replied to. I'm some other cunt. My bad.

As points out, it's just too long and the essays give you a sense.

If she insists, counter-offer to read The Fountainhead instead, it makes essentially the same point (less the apocalyptic stuff) and is considerably shorter.

I still maintain that if Rand could've dropped the heavy-handedness and made Peter Keating, not Roark, the true focus of The Fountainhead, the book could've been good.

I thought her prose was wonderful, but her characters are generally unrelatable because of her philosophy. If you can stomach that, then sure. The Fountainhead is better though, so give that a shot.

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>The writing is shit
That's your subjective opinion. Make a more concrete case for why people should believe you.
>the characters are shallow caricatures
In what sense? Again, make your case.
>most dialogue borders on surreal
Considering the work is a vehicle for her philosophy, dialogue may not come off as natural. People don't speak about abstractions in every day life as much her characters do. Would you criticize Plato on the same basis for his dialogue in "Meno"?

I haven't read Kant yet, so I'm going to use the Wiki page on "Critique of Pure Reason" beyond this point as a way to have some discussion that isn't out my ass. Guide the discussion if the wiki article is not sufficient.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason
>Transcendental Aesthetic
>"Kant denies in his answer that space and time belong to the subjective constitution of the mind"
>"Time and space cannot thus be regarded as existing in themselves. They are a priori forms of sensible intuition."
>"while we are prohibited from absolute knowledge of the thing-in-itself, we can impute to it a cause beyond ourselves as a source of representations within us. Kant's view of space and time rejects both the space and time of Aristotelian physics and the space and time of Newtonian physics."
Existence is a precondition of matter. Space and time are also preconditions of matter. Matter is a precondition of consciousness. The conclusion that space and time are subjective forms of perception, and to reject their phenomenal existence (attribute them as a priori), is by definition a rejection of the phenomenal world in its entirety. The denial of existence of matter and consciousness would mean that the concept of a priori non-exist. The critique that space and time are not concrete things that exist, or that our experience and reference to them is limited to their appearance (as we are only capable of communicating and dealing with appearances) is a fantastic way of of disarming any ability to counter the position. I wouldn't be able to tell you that the forms of space and time exist because this position would undermine my ability to make the claim that claims about forms, and would only allow me to make claims of appearances.

Let drop attacks of character against "Randians" while we're at it. Making generalizations of posers and people who aren't actually trying to engage with an author's work is trivial when you're trying to have a discussion.

The book is soooo good bro, also I am a huge faggot please rape my face.