I was forced to read "Anthem" out loud for several weeks as a high school English class assignment, and my reaction to the novel was the way you describe "Dianetics". Her writing style was extremely grating and her characters were all one-dimensional people whose only purpose was to convey her message. The novel was very boring and predictable, no memorial scenes come to mind. Around page 3, I pretty much got the premise that there is no individualism in the future society she described and that the word "I" was forbidden, but Rand continued to beat the reader over the idea with this concept about five times every day, with her characters giving droning monologues referring to themselves as "we" over and over again.
Dystopian sci-fi novels about a oppressive totalitarian future society are a dime a dozen (and that was the case even in Rand's heyday back in the 40s!), and other writers have done a much better of conveying the same concept she had. Perhaps that's why everyone remembers Orwell's "Big Brother is Watching You" even if they haven't read 1984, but nobody knows about "Equality 7-2521" except hard-core Rand fans and people like me who were forced to read the book.
It's amusing that Rand's fans have accused me of being biased against her because she's an atheist, since I didn't discover her views on religion until years later, nor did I realize she had a rabid cult of worshipers who insist her books should be "requiring reading" (which in my case, it certainly was!) until years later. I judged Rand's writing abilities solely on the content of the book itself. Given what I read, I completely reject the idea that she was some kind of masterful storyteller and brilliant visionary that everyone should listen to.
Wanna read something really scary and sickening ? I just got around to M. Stanton Evans’s “Blacklisted By History” about Joe McCarthy (with an added scope of the degree to which our government, and that of the UK and Japan, was penetrated by Soviet agents from the 1930s onward who helped to direct policy and mislead top officials — whom in turn often protected them even after it was KNOWN their loyalties). Over 600 pages, I’m over half-finished. Interesting to see how the left operates (especially the Democrats) in exactly the same way today, and the epic-level demogoguery. McCarthy got the “Palin” treatment to the nth degree.
You sound like you have made some incredible discovery.
I completely reject the idea that she was some kind of masterful storyteller and brilliant visionary that everyone should listen to.
Rejecting her novels as crap doesn't mean you should reject objectivsm. As I said above, objectivism is not incompatible with faith, but it takes a great deal of introspection to integrate faith into an objectivist conceptual hierarchy. It's a lot more work than Ayn Rand or most of her followers were will to do. Atheism is nothing more than laziness: choosing to not believe because it is easy.