Anthem
I like books set in a dystopian world and I liked what I read of Ayn Rand’s books, so it was a no brainer to read Anthem. The fact that it was about communism was also a plus.
I have to read Ayn Rand with a grain of salt because she’s so in love with her philosophy that it shows blatantly in her works. The description of a communist society set in the not-so-distant feature in Anthem was so over the top that it went past depressing and scary and arrived at funny. If bleak and uniform is what you expect of communism, the setting in Anthem won’t surprise you.
I was surprised that there was an optimistic love story in the book too. It doesn’t fit her philosophy of objectivism, but it made me like the book a bit more.
Anthem isn’t the best Ayn Rand book I read, but at a little over 100 pages, it’s not as much of a commitment as her other books. The story was generic, or maybe I’ve just read too many books of this kind. If I had read it when I was in junior high, I think I would like it better.
January 5th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
“The description of a communist society set in the not-so-distant feature in Anthem was so over the top that it went past depressing and scary and arrived at funny.”
Then I am afraid you completely missed the point. GWBush just signed into legislation the banning of the incandescent light bulb in favor of the mercury laden, preposterously expensive fluorescent replacements. Even considering their longer lifespan, they are no saving because I understand their development and production is funded by taxpayers. Like ‘free’ health care, it costs far more than any proper private system. Both are being promoted by the two largest most widespread frauds of the last 100 years: Environmentalism (anthropogenic global warming in particular) and Socialism. That these are frauds can be easily determined with only a modicum of serious investigation on the Internet for their fundamental intellectual and factual falsities.
Spend a little time with her non-fiction on writing (not until you have read a lot of other works by her, and “Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand” by Leonard Peikoff) and you will learn that all of her writing is a condensation to essentials. It is not the usual nifty stories written to suit popular notions of literature just for readers’ entertainment. Readers, accustomed to the latter literary approach must read through a different mental lens to appreciate her works, and in doing so discover that they had never been reading properly in the first place. In time those who make the effort discover an independence of thinking that renders most other authors as interesting but frequently flawed by their unidentified premises.
“…she’s so in love with her philosophy” simply displays your own view of knowledge as personally subjective and therefore arbitrary. This is precisely the point behind the previous paragraph. Rand’s non-fiction, and numerous works by those who have taken the time to think them through to see their Real World veracity, show that her philosophy is incontrovertibly true. It has produced exactly the positive consequences to be rationally expected when followed, as much as it has produced negative consequences when disregarded.
Take a better look before leaping to conclusions, and never take anyone’s word on faith, whether they oppose or support her ideas. Investigate every element with care, and compare it with reality. Contrast every naysayer’s objections with what she actually says.