The Fountainhead
This sure was a book.
The good: I think Rand is actually underrated as a stylist. There are places where her writing is actually quite good - some really wonderful descriptions, especially (unsurprisingly) of buildings. The strawmanniness of her characters isn't so bad if you think about her writing in a tradition of Horatio Alger or even Dickens, and I think she's actually quite funny (usually despite herself). And there's still something appealing about that angle in the story - the first half of the novel does expound a positive, compelling philosophy on the dignity of human endeavor
The bad: Christ, do people in this book like to talk. Rand never met a sentence that she didn't want to be a paragraph, and a paragraph that didn't want to be a page. Rourke, the only terse character in the novel, finishes the book with a thirty page monologue. Given that characters are generally repetitively expounding either the Best or the Worst Philosophy, this gets extremely tiresome; by the end of the book, I was just grinding through to get it done.
And if you take it seriously as philosophy, it's extremely inconsistent in ways that I'm sure other folks have already broken down.
The ugly: This is for sure a hateful, cruel book. In particular, Rand hates:
* Women
* The disabled
* The poor
* Fat people - in fact, you can generally tell the moral worth of a character by the way they're described. Fat, chubby, jowly, or anything related = good. Stout could go either way.
* Those who inherit their wealth (this one is fine)
* Gertrude Stein specifically
* Did I mention women? Because she really, really hates women.
Request in Books ↗The good: I think Rand is actually underrated as a stylist. There are places where her writing is actually quite good - some really wonderful descriptions, especially (unsurprisingly) of buildings. The strawmanniness of her characters isn't so bad if you think about her writing in a tradition of Horatio Alger or even Dickens, and I think she's actually quite funny (usually despite herself). And there's still something appealing about that angle in the story - the first half of the novel does expound a positive, compelling philosophy on the dignity of human endeavor
The bad: Christ, do people in this book like to talk. Rand never met a sentence that she didn't want to be a paragraph, and a paragraph that didn't want to be a page. Rourke, the only terse character in the novel, finishes the book with a thirty page monologue. Given that characters are generally repetitively expounding either the Best or the Worst Philosophy, this gets extremely tiresome; by the end of the book, I was just grinding through to get it done.
And if you take it seriously as philosophy, it's extremely inconsistent in ways that I'm sure other folks have already broken down.
The ugly: This is for sure a hateful, cruel book. In particular, Rand hates:
* Women
* The disabled
* The poor
* Fat people - in fact, you can generally tell the moral worth of a character by the way they're described. Fat, chubby, jowly, or anything related = good. Stout could go either way.
* Those who inherit their wealth (this one is fine)
* Gertrude Stein specifically
* Did I mention women? Because she really, really hates women.
Original source versions
This sure was a book.
The good: I think Rand is actually underrated as a stylist. There are places where her writing is actually quite good - some really wonderful descriptions, especially (unsurprisingly) of buildings. The strawmanniness of her characters isn't so bad if you think about her writing in a tradition of Horatio Alger or even Dickens, and I think she's actually quite funny (usually despite herself). And there's still something appealing about that angle in the story - the first half of the novel does expound a positive, compelling philosophy on the dignity of human endeavor
The bad: Christ, do people in this book like to talk. Rand never met a sentence that she didn't want to be a paragraph, and a paragraph that didn't want to be a page. Rourke, the only terse character in the novel, finishes the book with a thirty page monologue. Given that characters are generally repetitively expounding either the Best or the Worst Philosophy, this gets extremely tiresome; by the end of the book, I was just grinding through to get it done.
And if you take it seriously as philosophy, it's extremely inconsistent in ways that I'm sure other folks have already broken down.
The ugly: This is for sure a hateful, cruel book. In particular, Rand hates:
* Women
* The disabled
* The poor
* Fat people - in fact, you can generally tell the moral worth of a character by the way they're described. Fat, chubby, jowly, or anything related = good. Stout could go either way.
* Those who inherit their wealth (this one is fine)
* Gertrude Stein specifically
* Did I mention women? Because she really, really hates women.
The good: I think Rand is actually underrated as a stylist. There are places where her writing is actually quite good - some really wonderful descriptions, especially (unsurprisingly) of buildings. The strawmanniness of her characters isn't so bad if you think about her writing in a tradition of Horatio Alger or even Dickens, and I think she's actually quite funny (usually despite herself). And there's still something appealing about that angle in the story - the first half of the novel does expound a positive, compelling philosophy on the dignity of human endeavor
The bad: Christ, do people in this book like to talk. Rand never met a sentence that she didn't want to be a paragraph, and a paragraph that didn't want to be a page. Rourke, the only terse character in the novel, finishes the book with a thirty page monologue. Given that characters are generally repetitively expounding either the Best or the Worst Philosophy, this gets extremely tiresome; by the end of the book, I was just grinding through to get it done.
And if you take it seriously as philosophy, it's extremely inconsistent in ways that I'm sure other folks have already broken down.
The ugly: This is for sure a hateful, cruel book. In particular, Rand hates:
* Women
* The disabled
* The poor
* Fat people - in fact, you can generally tell the moral worth of a character by the way they're described. Fat, chubby, jowly, or anything related = good. Stout could go either way.
* Those who inherit their wealth (this one is fine)
* Gertrude Stein specifically
* Did I mention women? Because she really, really hates women.
This sure was a book.
The good: I think Rand is actually underrated as a stylist. There are places where her writing is actually quite good - some really wonderful descriptions, especially (unsurprisingly) of buildings. The strawmanniness of her characters isn't so bad if you think about her writing in a tradition of Horatio Alger or even Dickens, and I think she's actually quite funny (usually despite herself). And there's still something appealing about that angle in the story - the first half of the novel does expound a positive, compelling philosophy on the dignity of human endeavor
The bad: Christ, do people in this book like to talk. Rand never met a sentence that she didn't want to be a paragraph, and a paragraph that didn't want to be a page. Rourke, the only terse character in the novel, finishes the book with a thirty page monologue. Given that characters are generally repetitively expounding either the Best or the Worst Philosophy, this gets extremely tiresome; by the end of the book, I was just grinding through to get it done.
And if you take it seriously as philosophy, it's extremely inconsistent in ways that I'm sure other folks have already broken down.
The ugly: This is for sure a hateful, cruel book. In particular, Rand hates:
* Women
* The disabled
* The poor
* Fat people - in fact, you can generally tell the moral worth of a character by the way they're described. Fat, chubby, jowly, or anything related = good. Stout could go either way.
* Those who inherit their wealth (this one is fine)
* Gertrude Stein specifically
* Did I mention women? Because she really, really hates women.
The good: I think Rand is actually underrated as a stylist. There are places where her writing is actually quite good - some really wonderful descriptions, especially (unsurprisingly) of buildings. The strawmanniness of her characters isn't so bad if you think about her writing in a tradition of Horatio Alger or even Dickens, and I think she's actually quite funny (usually despite herself). And there's still something appealing about that angle in the story - the first half of the novel does expound a positive, compelling philosophy on the dignity of human endeavor
The bad: Christ, do people in this book like to talk. Rand never met a sentence that she didn't want to be a paragraph, and a paragraph that didn't want to be a page. Rourke, the only terse character in the novel, finishes the book with a thirty page monologue. Given that characters are generally repetitively expounding either the Best or the Worst Philosophy, this gets extremely tiresome; by the end of the book, I was just grinding through to get it done.
And if you take it seriously as philosophy, it's extremely inconsistent in ways that I'm sure other folks have already broken down.
The ugly: This is for sure a hateful, cruel book. In particular, Rand hates:
* Women
* The disabled
* The poor
* Fat people - in fact, you can generally tell the moral worth of a character by the way they're described. Fat, chubby, jowly, or anything related = good. Stout could go either way.
* Those who inherit their wealth (this one is fine)
* Gertrude Stein specifically
* Did I mention women? Because she really, really hates women.