> "I was a politically motivated person when I was a teenager. Of all the books that radicalized me, it was the Aynd Rand books (Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) that did."

A heartfelt "Thank you!" to Ken on account of having at least the courtesy of saving cool people's time by putting the Origin Story into the first sentences.

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littlestymaar 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

That John Rogers' quote hits the mark again: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

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kaon_2 2 days ago | parent [-]

Is Atlas Shrugged really that bad? Heh, I started reading the fountainhead in my mid 30ies. The natural way you get introduced to new characters is great, but man I got so angry with the unrealistic robotic personalities I kept putting the book away and after 200 pages I really just could not continue. So Atlas Shrugged is similar? What a disappointment!

Anybody here that loved the books and would care to elaborate it speak to them so much?

	▲	crimsoneer 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		As a teenager who went through quite a similar journey back in the day, it wasn't as much the books (which are quite badly written, I still have PTSD from that monologue) and more about the story very plainly supporting the view of the world I had back then... Champions of industry, unshackled by free enterprise, freed from the stagnation of governance etc.

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dcre 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

At least you can tell they wrote it themselves — an LLM couldn’t write a sentence that bad.

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balamatom 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If you're so cool and all, do you have a hypothesis as to why in Slavic languages they keep translatin' "Atlas Shrugged" as "Atlas Straightened His Shoulders"?