Don't Shrug, Atlas!

Hello all, it's been a while since I've reviewed.  Fear not, I have been reading.  I'll try to get a few posts up here in the next few days.  I know the general tint of this blog is to review books about paranormal romance, which I appreciate in small portions.  However, recently I've been reading all sorts of things.  So, hold onto your hats and let's jump into Ayn Rand's masterpiece Atlas Shrugged.

This book is set in the industrial age.  There are many great men, and one woman, doing many great things.  Mining copper, harvesting oil, building cars, buildings, railroads, cities.  Then, the looters start to take over.  Men and women fighting reason with illogic, and for some reason winning.  The common people don't know what to do, but as "who is John Galt?"  There are dozens of characters, but only a handful relevant to the plot. (May I just say that this book is enormous? It is 1063 pages with 6-7 pt font.  It took me 5 weeks of round trip commute reading to make it through.  So, whatever shortcuts I take in describing the plot, characters and so forth, I believe I have earned by actually reading the whole damn thing.)
Ok, so we've got Dagny Taggart, Hank Readen, Francisco d'Anconia, and John Galt.  Dagny runs the largest and most successful railroad.  Hank Rearden, through research and years of hard work, has created his own super strong and super light type of metal, Francisco is the heir to an international copper dynasty, and John Galt is the man who will stop the motor of the world.  Rather, John Galt is a brilliant inventor who was able to create a motor run on static electricity, basically the key to perpetual, free power.  But what had happened was, Galt began to see a change in the world where men he called "looters" were living off the hard work of those who were actually inventing and investing.  The looters were starting to take over everything through a grossly engorged sense of humanism, in which doing things for ones' own ambition and self worth was meaningless; all was to be done for the good of the common people. Galt realized that his hard work was going to be free-loaded by senseless morons.  So, he quit and vowed to stop the motor of the world so that the looters would perish in the peril of their own creation.  Then he went to all the other industrialists and convinced them to quit as well.  That's basically it.  They all end up quitting, and after some very long speeches, run off to the Atlantas Galt designed.

However, there were some pretty intense romantic triangles.  Dagny and Francisco grew up together.  They were each other's first.  Then Galt got Francisco to quit, so he had to sort of push Dagny out of his life so he wouldn't hurt her.  But he saved himself for her.  And really, she was the only woman left in the world worth laying.  Eventually, he reveals that he's still totes into her, but not before Hank Readen gets to her.  Hank and Dagny were working together to build more railroads with his Readen Metal and eventually they realize they are the only people in the world worth sexing too. So, they start up a really steamy love affair, steamy because Hank is married, and Dagny had that thing with Francisco and she's the only woman left in the world worth boning.  For reals.

Then, if you didn't think that love triangle was perfect enough, John Galt reveals himself to Dagny, and she realizes that HE is the one she has always loved, and there is no one else in the world anywhere near as good as John Galt.  The thing I don't get is that Francisco and Hank are pretty much entirely ok with this.  As if, obvs, if they were gay they would totally be after Galt themselves.  Ok, but in the midst of Dagny being shuffled around between the only 3 men left in the world with sleeping with, there's a great quote:
          "Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.  Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself...sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment, an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire."

I mean, I apologize to all the feminists out there offended by the male-centric language, but really this is a very empowering statement.  The value that you give yourself is betrayed in your sexual partners.  I think that's very true, even though at that point, they were both talking about Dagny (and they didn't know yet that they were both talking about Dagny.  Poor Hank and Francisco, at least they had her for a time.)

There was a really long speech (like 30 pages) by John Galt that I didn't read in it's entirity.  It was just too damn long.  The other thing that made me angry was that one of my favorite minor characters, Eddie Willers, totally got the shaft at the end of the book.  He didn't get to go to Atlantas, he got abandoned in the middle of Arizona.  He grew up with Dagny and Francisco, why did he get abandoned at the end.  I'm expecting all our readers who have encountered this book in an academic setting to have a good answer for me.  Get on that.

Overall, I'm giving it an A-.  It was enough to get my attention at 7:30 in the morning, it was not enough to convince me to read a 30 page speech at 6-7 point font.  Show, don't tell, Ayn Rand.  Show, don't tell.