Recent Reading

I've been reading books. Surprise!

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

I read this about a year ago, and decided to give it another shot. The first time I read it, I did some skimming toward the end. I don't feel guilty about that, because it's 1100 pages, and there's a speech near the end that takes over 60 pages. That's a really long monologue, and it's really, really preachy. It's clearly the author's intent to be preachy there, but that doesn't change the fact that I don't always feel like being lectured to for 60 pages.

The book is a classic, I guess, at least if you judge by the number of people who still consider themselves Objectivists. That's the philosophy which is put forth by this book and The Fountainhead, and in my opinion, it's kind of goofy. The basic principle seems to be that the profit motive is the only acceptable reason to do anything. And I've got no essential problem with a philosophy that espouses selfishness (incidentally, why is it that the only time I use the word "espouse" is when I'm talking about a philosophy?), but I don't like the way it's being argued here.

For one thing, Atlas Shrugged is nothing but a great big (no, bigger than that. Did I mention the 1100 pages?) strawman argument. Ayn Rand apparently really hated the theory behind communism, and spends hundreds of pages directing her hate at the whole "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". If only every country in the world hadn't gome communist! As you can imagine, that's not a terribly frightening thought now that even Russia is commie-free.

All the bad guys in the book are weird and unrealistic. And that's tricky, because everyone except for about twenty people are bad guys. So the bad guys in government are doing something obviously propped-up, and that causes all the superefficient good guys to respond, but the situation just never rings true to me. Plus, although all the good guys are, as I say, superefficient, it's an Idiot Plot. There are many times when a good guy almost realizes what's going on, but "his mind refused to accept it" so we have to keep going for another few hundred pages.

I think there are two reasons I didn't like the book. First, as a novel, it's just way too long with no real justification. Everyone knows how it's going to end. Heck, half the characters know how it's going to end. But it just keeps slogging away. Oh, and Ayn Rand should not write sex scenes. It's creepy. The other reason I didn't like it is that the philosophy bugged me. You know, when L. Ron Hubbard wrote the foolishly-long Battlefield Earth, he kept his wackiness out of it. More or less. Look, there wasn't a 60-page speech about Dianetics in it, was there?

In the big speech, which apparently takes three hours for all the characters to listen to raptly, the phrase "A is A" is repeated, um, repeatedly. I'd always kind of wondered what that was supposed to prove, and it turns out the answer is: everything. It's kind of a magic phrase that's supposed to convince you of something. When a character says "A is A", he means that, for example, a man is what he produces. It seems to me that a more accurate sentence would be "A is B", but what do I know? I've never written a thousand-page book that's still in print forty years later.

Oh: there's a card in the middle of the book that directs me to go to the Ayn Rand Institute for more information. More information? Jesus!

The Glass Key, by Dashiell Hammett

Hammett's great. Great. The novel The Maltese Falcon is, if you ask me, way better than the movie. He invented the hardboiled detective novel, and I have much respect for him. But I've, um, only read one of his books. And I've always heard that The Glass Key is his second-best book. So I bought it.

In fact, I bought it two or three years ago. It's a 50-cent Dell paperback from 1966 (the book first appeared in print in 1931), and I imagine it's gotten pretty impatient to be read. One of the reasons I wanted to read it was a review that ended "a good book and an enthralling one, and the best you have read since The Maltese Falcon. And if you didn't read that, this is the swiftest book you've ever read in your life." I was kind of in the mood for a swift book after Atlas Shrugged.

Incidentally, that review's title was "Oh look - A good book!" and was written by Dorothy Parker. Who are you to argue with Dorothy Parker?

It's about some murders and some political fixers. You know, the guys who decide who gets the nominations and hand out the spoils to the cronies. And it's really good, because it's by Dashiell Hammett. The only problem is that it gets me in the mood for more hardboiled detective fiction, and the bookstores are coincidentally full of racks containing nice new editions of Raymond Chandler novels. This won't end well.