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Jun. 17th, 2003 01:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaI finished Atlas Shrugged!
...Well, look, have you seen the size of the thing? I don't often view the simple getting through of a book as an achievement, but that was 1200 hardcover pages worth of intermittent polemic. Quality, I have to say, because I can't peg as a bad writer someone who managed the Herculean feat of keeping me interested in her characters through all the set-piece rants she gave them.
I still maintain Borges could've written the damned thing in 20 pages, with exegesis and discourse on variant texts and authorial intent. It... felt very much like reading one of his books, the impossible ones that he limits himself to describing. I had an instinctive urge, at one point, that John Galt should remain like Al-Mutasim, a voice from beyond a shabby curtain... but gnosticism runs counter to what Ayn Rand was trying to achieve, dunnit. (And it is slashy, so there, but in the spillover way of shounen fighting manga. Dagny's love life just makes me obscenely cheery. Sometimes it's good to be outnumbered in the workplace. And notice how it's only the socialists who're fat and ugly?)
The tome I found myself eyeballing in Indigo the other day was Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics - that and Alan Moore's V For Vendetta. I think I badly need to find some fluffy liberal bleeding-heart reading matter. Should've borrowed Naomi Klein off Justin before he flew the coop for the Mediterranean coast of Spain. >_>
In other news, Popjustice is one of those blogs that's just manifestly bad for one. Typically when I check it, the next thing I know I've been listening to Dannii Minogue for the last half hour.
...Well, look, have you seen the size of the thing? I don't often view the simple getting through of a book as an achievement, but that was 1200 hardcover pages worth of intermittent polemic. Quality, I have to say, because I can't peg as a bad writer someone who managed the Herculean feat of keeping me interested in her characters through all the set-piece rants she gave them.
I still maintain Borges could've written the damned thing in 20 pages, with exegesis and discourse on variant texts and authorial intent. It... felt very much like reading one of his books, the impossible ones that he limits himself to describing. I had an instinctive urge, at one point, that John Galt should remain like Al-Mutasim, a voice from beyond a shabby curtain... but gnosticism runs counter to what Ayn Rand was trying to achieve, dunnit. (And it is slashy, so there, but in the spillover way of shounen fighting manga. Dagny's love life just makes me obscenely cheery. Sometimes it's good to be outnumbered in the workplace. And notice how it's only the socialists who're fat and ugly?)
The tome I found myself eyeballing in Indigo the other day was Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics - that and Alan Moore's V For Vendetta. I think I badly need to find some fluffy liberal bleeding-heart reading matter. Should've borrowed Naomi Klein off Justin before he flew the coop for the Mediterranean coast of Spain. >_>
In other news, Popjustice is one of those blogs that's just manifestly bad for one. Typically when I check it, the next thing I know I've been listening to Dannii Minogue for the last half hour.
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Date: 2003-06-17 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-17 06:55 am (UTC)