Thus the saying - it’s hard to account for taste. Yes the book could have been 3x shorter, but I’d be hard-pressed to pick out the the parts to be discarded (though I’d probably start with Galt’s 3-hour speech - as much of what he states is covered elsewhere in the book).
I’d advise you on a personal level , that while you may not worship at this temple, you are still on hallowed ground. You may be “right”, but it wouldn’t hurt to keep you hat in your hands. Just my two cents...
Thanks!
I stated I agreed with the message, but didn’t like the style.
You are a gentleman.
God loves a gentleman.
Rand's style is appealing enough for those with teen-aged sensibilities -- teens are, after all, attracted by Rand's kind of breathless outrage, which matches their own.
As Whittaker Chambers so aptly put it:
Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storyknown as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.
Rand is offensive to adult tastes, precisely because adults are not fooled by her strident emotional overtures. Adults have seen "those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly." And they properly reject those who would have us pretend that those intermediate shades do not exist.