/lit/ - Literature

>>861270

lol

>>830577
>Ocarina of Time is just as much a masterpiece as Finnegan's Wake

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

>I _loved_ this book in high school. Loved it. Thought I was John Galt, the whole nine yards. Then realized that I wasn't, and that the book is just a series of straw-man characters vilified by comparison with the (invariably slender and Aryan) heroes. The false dichotomy between achievers and leeches is all too easy for impressionable teens (especially arrogant ones like me) to adopt. It's just so seductive, so neat. But ultimately wrong, and obviously so, once you've gotten out in the world even the slightest bit.

>A overwritten primer in hubris-fueled individualism that I blame for all the self-satisfied and arrogant architects (and designers) out there, if not for all the self-centered, materialistic and greedy attitudes that plague most western societies today. I would also include "Atlas Shrugged" on my list if I didn't find that book even more deplorable—all the big industrialists disappear from society and the world shuts down and begs them to come back? Please. There are better, more humanistic ways to produce great art and rich societies. Rand's work is a fascist wolf clothed in a meritocratic sheep's clothing.

>I found myself thinking Rand had a point at several times in the novel, but then I realized that there is a difference between individuality (which I stand by) and selfishness (which I don't.)

>I admit, at the time that I read it, I liked it. I was even, for a few youthful months, taken in by Ayn Rand and her Objectivism. But then, I matured a little and got a clue and abandoned any such enthusiasm. And now my only lingering impressions of this over-long book are the verbal fellation of modernist architecture, and a scene in which pity is decried as the dirtiest feeling possible. So many pages, and yet so little taken from them.