Book review: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

The first thing I noticed about this book is that it is huge. A monstrous 891 pages long. After I had read The Fountainhead (thanks to my cuz), I had always wanted to read Atlas Shrugged. After finishing all the interviews, I had nothing to do at home. So I started this book. It took me around 15 days to complete it (a side product of this was a nifty little tool I made to track my daily and weekly bookmarks, ultimately displaying a really useful graph which helps me understand my reading habits). I found out that I read the most on Wednesdays. What's the use of this? Who knows It will help someday somehow. Anyways on with the review.

The book starts on a good note and the development of characters is quite crisp. The contrast between the brother-sister duo of James and Dagny Taggart is interesting. But somewhere in the middle, the book veers off on a long journey which sometimes bores me. I really get distracted when authors start on some side-topic and write pages and pages on it, and you're just mindlessly moving your eyes over the lines, and then suddenly you come back to the original storyline and you almost miss it. Michael Crichton is another author who does this often. Somehow it makes me feel that it is being done just to increase the number of pages.

No doubt, if Howard Roark was the eternal struggler in the Fountainhead, so is Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged. But the character I liked the most was Hank Rearden. His cold, impersonal but logical talk made him a man to fear and respect. The villain of the story is not a single person as in The Fountainhead (Ellsworth Toohey), but a collection of "moral" industrialists.

The climax of the story is of course John Galt's speech (won't disclose when and where). After a continuous spattering of his hard-hitting words, the story picks up pace and finishes surprisingly as an action novel. A nice read but I prefer the Fountainhead due to its clearer and stronger message about individualism.