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Monday, 22 August 2011 08:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eighthphaseOkay, let's see if this works. So earlier I was complaining talking about Atlas Shrugged; more specifically, I was talking about how I was talking about it.
This time let's see if I can't just talk about it!
So, it's really really hard to get through. I don't know how I managed four chapters yesterday; today I had to force myself through a chapter and a half. (I'm only in chapter twelve! Of thirty!) What's really weird about this book, though, is that the reason I can't stand it now is not the reason I couldn't stand it when I first started reading! At first it seemed like I might have liked it if it were less trainwrecky, then I started realising that there were, in fact, a handful of vaguely likable characters. Then my problem was less that it was trainwrecky and more that it was just unbelievably boring.
I am not even kidding about that. The book is a bunch of spineless stupid people (they're socialists and that's apparently why they're spineless and stupid) talking at each other and doing stupid, selfish, hypocritical things, interspersed with brief periods in which vaguely interesting characters do vaguely interesting things. Sometimes these vaguely interesting characters even get together and do mildly interesting things! But when that happens you pay for it with even more boring talky stupid scenes. (These vaguely interesting characters are all, by the way, capitalists. They also do mostly selfish things, but they're better than the socialists because... they're honest about how they're selfish? I guess.)
There's been talk about this crazy pirate guy who steals from the rich and gives to... himself, apparently; and everybody talks about John Galt (Who is John Galt? Protip: nobody actually cares!) and how he found the Fountain of Youth and he discovered Atlantis and probably craps rainbows, too; but everything about them is just hearsay. Francisco d'Anconia started out awesome and with each subsequent appearance it gets harder for me to tell if I really like him or really hate him, because he is such a complete troll. Hank Rearden really only cares about his business and not his family (although his family really only seems to exist to be socialists and to make him feel guilty about being a capitalist so I guess that's okay) but he's a successful businessman and he knows how to get stuff done. Dagny Taggart is a cutthroat bitch who runs Taggart Transcontinental much better than her brother does, even though her brother is the president and does everything he can to make her job harder (one of them is a socialist and one of them is a capitalist. Guess which is which.); she also knows how to get stuff done.
You wouldn't think "knowing how to get stuff done" would be a particularly redeemable quality, but in Atlas Shrugged, it most definitely is. This list of people consists of: Dagny, Rearden, Frisco before he decided to troll everybody, the oil guy who challenged Dagny to build the John Galt Line before he set fire to his oil fields and faked his death, and that other guy who made, like, motors or cars or something like that, before he mysteriously vanished. And I guess the coal guy who was friends with that other guy and who is probably going to be the next one to do a runner.
See, that's the ~*~mystery~*~ that's going on, starting with Frisco d'Anconia and continuing on forever: all these super smart successfulcapitalists businessmen captalists/businessmen are suddenly driving their businesses into the ground and/or mysteriously vanishing and/or both! And nobody knows why! And Dagny's going to find out! And I guess it would be an intriguing mystery if I didn't already know what the reason why is and that it's really dumb the book weren't so ridiculously boring to read.
But it is. It's like the freaking Sword of Truth series all over again, except with less magic and action and more economics and talking. (There's a certain part of the book - a speech that occurs... near the end, I think - that I'm fairly sure is going to read just like the entirety of Naked Empire. Which is in absolutely no way a good thing.) Except that I actually kind of liked the Sword of Truth series, in a crappy fantasy kind of way! And I cannot say the same thing about Atlas Shrugged.
tl;dr: Atlas Shrugged is really really tl;dr.
This time let's see if I can't just talk about it!
So, it's really really hard to get through. I don't know how I managed four chapters yesterday; today I had to force myself through a chapter and a half. (I'm only in chapter twelve! Of thirty!) What's really weird about this book, though, is that the reason I can't stand it now is not the reason I couldn't stand it when I first started reading! At first it seemed like I might have liked it if it were less trainwrecky, then I started realising that there were, in fact, a handful of vaguely likable characters. Then my problem was less that it was trainwrecky and more that it was just unbelievably boring.
I am not even kidding about that. The book is a bunch of spineless stupid people (they're socialists and that's apparently why they're spineless and stupid) talking at each other and doing stupid, selfish, hypocritical things, interspersed with brief periods in which vaguely interesting characters do vaguely interesting things. Sometimes these vaguely interesting characters even get together and do mildly interesting things! But when that happens you pay for it with even more boring talky stupid scenes. (These vaguely interesting characters are all, by the way, capitalists. They also do mostly selfish things, but they're better than the socialists because... they're honest about how they're selfish? I guess.)
There's been talk about this crazy pirate guy who steals from the rich and gives to... himself, apparently; and everybody talks about John Galt (Who is John Galt? Protip: nobody actually cares!) and how he found the Fountain of Youth and he discovered Atlantis and probably craps rainbows, too; but everything about them is just hearsay. Francisco d'Anconia started out awesome and with each subsequent appearance it gets harder for me to tell if I really like him or really hate him, because he is such a complete troll. Hank Rearden really only cares about his business and not his family (although his family really only seems to exist to be socialists and to make him feel guilty about being a capitalist so I guess that's okay) but he's a successful businessman and he knows how to get stuff done. Dagny Taggart is a cutthroat bitch who runs Taggart Transcontinental much better than her brother does, even though her brother is the president and does everything he can to make her job harder (one of them is a socialist and one of them is a capitalist. Guess which is which.); she also knows how to get stuff done.
You wouldn't think "knowing how to get stuff done" would be a particularly redeemable quality, but in Atlas Shrugged, it most definitely is. This list of people consists of: Dagny, Rearden, Frisco before he decided to troll everybody, the oil guy who challenged Dagny to build the John Galt Line before he set fire to his oil fields and faked his death, and that other guy who made, like, motors or cars or something like that, before he mysteriously vanished. And I guess the coal guy who was friends with that other guy and who is probably going to be the next one to do a runner.
See, that's the ~*~mystery~*~ that's going on, starting with Frisco d'Anconia and continuing on forever: all these super smart successful
But it is. It's like the freaking Sword of Truth series all over again, except with less magic and action and more economics and talking. (There's a certain part of the book - a speech that occurs... near the end, I think - that I'm fairly sure is going to read just like the entirety of Naked Empire. Which is in absolutely no way a good thing.) Except that I actually kind of liked the Sword of Truth series, in a crappy fantasy kind of way! And I cannot say the same thing about Atlas Shrugged.
tl;dr: Atlas Shrugged is really really tl;dr.