Sarcasm aside, I should mention that it is pretty impressive that in his politics section he seems to have books from every single point of view.

I suggest you download the unabridged audio version of Atlas Shrugged from audible.com or iTunes. It's read incredibly well and you'll probably enjoy it immensely...

Thank you for the recommendation for The Fountainhead -- I'll consider finally reading it some day so I can form a personal opinion of it rather than basing my opinion off others' comments of it.

Reading Rand’s essays both made me appreciate her views more and made me cautious to accept her epistemology as a whole. I don’t consider myself an Objectivist, but I still consider her work to be a strong influence on my life.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Much of what makes an audiobook great is the reader's grasp of the material. Both of these books are great works of literature, but the skill of the reader makes them even better as audiobooks.

> It's taught me to be honest with myself even if the social norms aren't in alignment with I'm doing.

Especially this.

Giving up who you really are can be a very high price to pay just to be able to receive some (more) money.

Its difficult to take a book seriously with such caricatured and poorly written characters. I've seen better writing in comic books.

Likewise. In addition, The Fountainhead was, IMO, better written... and it has the additional perk of being shorter than Atlas Shrugged. If anyone was thinking of sampling Rand, I'd almost always suggest starting with The Fountainhead.

This. I've also read The Fountainhead, and Roark's personality would not get him the same result in the real world. It's fantastic and fictional.

I don't agree with everything in it, but it is one of those books that really makes you rethink your life when read at the right time.

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

How To Win Friends And Influence People - Dale Carnegie

The Game - Neil Strauss

The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank

... among others.

The Fountainhead,

Stranger in a Strange Land,

The Rules of Life,

Catch-22,

1984,

Brave New World, and

An Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning (by Peter Eccles)

- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

No it's not. It's really not.

I don't want to get into a big AS bashing here, but if you're looking for a good Ayn Rand novel on individualism I suggest you try 'The Fountainhead'.

The love story in it is kind of weird, okay really weird, but besides that I like the book. Most of the over-the-top strawman librul bad guys, and attempts to morally justify Laissez-faire capitalism mostly came from Atlas Shrugged. The Fountainhead is more focused on an individual who wants to realize greatness for its own sake.

That said: The Fountainhead is a great read, and so is Atlas Shrugged, even if it's not the absolute masterpiece she intended.

Also, reading the Fountainhead was a game changer for me.

It never occurred to me that the book might have other purposes than that. I think I'm going to check out The Fountainhead first though.

Let's not descend into "I've just read The Fountainhead and I think it solves all societal problems" rhetorical territory, eh?

To make a response to the article's summary, which is

> I am confident that giving engineers more autonomy and ownership will transform the way software is created and increase the quality of the results, and The Fountainhead provides an excellent example of what real autonomy and ownership look like.

It is already well known that giving Software Engineers more autonomy and ownership can be excellent for productivity and software quality, and it's a bit laughable that the author says The Fountainhead is what "real" autonomy and ownership look like.

Howard Roark is far less realistic a person than the majority of protagonists in fiction books, who themselves aren't of course realistic. Howard Roark is an argument in character form, and the universe of The Fountainhead is built to forward Rand's worldview, not be a vehicle for the exploration of life's conflicts and complexity.

I would actively point teenagers away from Atlas Shrugged. While it might be enlightening, and they might enjoy the story, it has the potential to be quite destructive if they interpret her philosophy of objectivism & egoism in a way that leads them to apply it to their own lives. I just don't think this is a good idea. Her other novels, whether The Fountainhead or We The Living aren't nearly so overbearing.

Another one: How To Lie with Statistics

Rand has a very distinct philosophy and is quite black-and-white, but even if you don't agree with everything hopefully you can appreciate the writing and storytelling in The Fountainhead (and others). It seems that a lot of the discussion about Rand is focused on her philosophy and if it's right or wrong. This is probably justified but also obscures the fact that she was a master at writing.

I read this book in my early 20s and loved it. Even though I've become much more liberal on many issues (proponent of universal healthcare, tax-payer paid higher ed, etc.) I can still appreciate the themes in her work.

Also just finished Anthem last night- I recommend checking it out. Super short but really gripping read.

2007 - 1943 = 64

1981 + 64 = 2045

Many of the characters are caricatures, which, given the length of the book, I'll concede is more annoying than it is humorous. I did think Hank was solid.

Almost all of the antagonists are, as you say, ridiculously shallow, which goes to your point about her agenda. She did a shockingly better job with The Fountainhead (which I liked less) - but still far from perfect.

Finally, about the plot being obvious. That's true of most stories. It's a big book, and there were plenty of small plots and paths that I wasn't sure how they'd turn out.

Reductio ad absurdum could have been entertaining in a ~300 page package (I'm thinking Animal Farm).

Or the actual reason why the author thinks Ayn Rand should be "dumped", in case you are wondering.

President Trump is a fan of Ayn Rand. Travis Kalanick likes her books. John Mackey likes her books aswell. This proofs that Ayn Rand is evil and therefore her ideas are evil. Guilty by association.

Someone who somehow survived the atrocities of communism and dedicated the rest of her life to make sure nobody would face the same atrocities like she did again. And this person is considered to be evil.

Well, you know what, author over at Vanity Fair? Maybe Ayn Rand had some points which are debatable but YOU have unmasked yourself as a far left "liberal" ideologue. So fuck off, and take your ideological bullshit with you.

1) I keep a photo on my desk as well as the back ground on my computer:
http://austingwalters.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/skyline...

It is an image I took at the Taste of Chicago. There was a crowd of roughly 10,000 people and directly above them there is a group of buildings, seemingly rising from the crowd. The picture always reminds me that humanity is the creature that can build ANYTHING. So, I find that motivational because I want to be one of the people to build something like a skyscraper making me worthy of calling myself human.

2) I read inspirational books, to me The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand) and Time Enough for Love (Robert Heinlein) are always inspirational because they project characters that are considered "ideal" or at least worthy of aspiring to be. I also read a fair amount of history books and biographies about inspirational people, if find it helps me to maintain focus when I am attempting to be competitive (in work ethic) with the great people throughout history or characters with similar traits.

3) I go for walks and think. Nothing is better than pure and utter relaxation/boredom to stimulate your creativity and motivation. For example the average person can only do high quality mental processing (learning or creative thinking) about 4 hours a day and if you want to increase the that 4 hours to a longer period you must extend the relaxation time as well. In other words, its good to do stuff you enjoy and its good to be lazy for a while, it gets you motivated to do other things.

Rand believed very firmly in her philosophy. Her fiction, however, is romanticized: Rand says that she portrays things not as they are, but as how she wishes they could be. It pains me when her "followers" take her black-and-white approach literally.

Also, I second Walden by Thoreau and suggest you read the Fountainhead. The Fountainhead isn't quite as blunt as Atlas Shrugged, but I find it a lot more life affirming and positive.

Read them multiple times in my late teens / early 20s.

Another was Nineteen Eighty Four by Orwell.

I'd also cite The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand as having influenced me, although I read it when I was older and found that it mostly reinforced ideas that I was already sympathetic towards. Similar situation with Atlas Shrugged, also by Rand.

I could probably also call out The Soul of a New Machine by Kidder, as being a primary influence that pushed me in the direction of getting involved with computers.

Otherwise, it looks like you're in exactly the right point in life to risk being broke for a while in order to gain the type of job you want.

I don't know about the specifics of your local job market, but one thing I would do is find a reputable recruiter (i.e. one held in high esteem by progammers; such creatures are rare but they do exist) and ask for advice. Explain your goals, and see if they're realistic in your area.

Also, attend meetups in your area, and speak to developers and recruiters there. Most old hands will be more than willing to share advice and experiences, and some of them will even be correct and relevant :)

Consider the words of Roark in The Fountainhead (great motivational book, by the way): "If you want my advice, Peter, you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work." My guess is that you already know, deep down, what you want to do :)

Favorite quote from the book —

“Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.”

Other influential books: 1984, The Fountainhead, and Siddhartha

I think Atlas Shrugged is more likely to be what draws criticism to Ayn Rand. It plays more on extremist ideas that the elite class should cull the weak. The Fountainhead exemplifies the idea that one should master their craft, that all good work is art, that there's a real beauty to "form follows function" which requires one to actually think about what they're doing. Around the time of reading The Fountainhead I got into a debate about the architecture I took in writing nobox, a minimalist window manager

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=103499

Or anything Vonnegut or Philip K Dick

A personal "brain expanding" book for me was The Miracle Planet but timing is everything, as an 8 year old who had only been reading children's books it taught me that you can read through anything with persistence

The Bible has a lot of mind games & plot twists. I read it as an atheist seeking better perspective on a couple thousand years ago

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Foundation Trilogy -Isaac Asimov

The Game: Penetrating The Secret Society of Pickup Artists - Neil Strauss

The Law - Frédéric Bastiat

Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress - Robert Heinlein

Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier - Katie Hafner & John Markoff

It's Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be: The World's Best Selling Book - Paul Arden

Are ones that stand out. I'm sure a lot of other books helped shape my worldview though, especially ones I read as a kid. The "Tom Swift Jr." adventures, the "Three Investigators" stories, the "Nancy Drew" and "The Hardy Boys" ones, and those "Encyclopedia Brown" books all stand out in my memory as probably being influential. And later in life, I'd say Dean Koontz' work has had something of an impact.

Have you read The Fountainhead by any chance? :)

In order to understand her methods you must understand her epistemology. This requires reading her nonfiction systematically (and Peikoff's).

Here's a Reddit reaction to Rand's response to a letter:
http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1reias/til_th...
especially see this response:
http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1reias/til_th...

She's completely misunderstood and misrepresented. There are countless examples of this.

In politics, she's seen as the epitome of all that is "right wing", whatever the Hell that means. Her ethics are disregarded as simple ignorant selfishness. It's easy to see why many would disagree with her.

Academia simply dismisses her. However, her ideas are becoming harder to ignore - they are important!

Highly recommend reading at least Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. Then pick up Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and the recently released Understanding Objectivism . UO is very good (it's useful/personal, down to earth), but requires familiarity with Objectivism.

These are generally the kind of hard working working people who get cheated due to office politics, or an unfair boss, or the people who score less marks because the teacher wanted to reward her otherwise favorite pupil.

One of the top reasons why people want to have their own business is because 'working for others' ultimately leads to a situation where you do all the work, while not getting nearly the atom worth the due rewards you deserve. Its not selfish or arrogant or even wrong that such people ultimately take things into their own hands and refuse to put up with being treated unfairly.

When I first read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. The philosophy of it looked straight obvious and something that I myself have gone through.

Rand's philosophy is not the case, but rather a effect of a deep rooted malaise where some people find it perfectly fine to cheat. And expect the person to be fine being cheated.

On a side note, I attended a Start up conference a years back here Bangalore. At the end there was open panel discussion as to what makes a better career option 'Start up or a Job at a Megacorp' a middle manager from representing a mega corp called start up founders are impatient, greedy and selfish. This is how bad the situation gets when you put up with unfair treatment, the person cheating thinks it's perfectly ok to treat you unfairly. And more, it is unfair to him that you refuse to get cheated.

Want to prevent the Rand philosophy from spreading, do something that triggers its flow and adoption at the first place. But we all already know that's not going to happen.

My interpretation of The Fountainhead was as I described previously - the importance of staying true to who you are, even if this results in missing out on riches (or goes against popular opinion).

He does make it easy for people to parrot things. But the human capitalization rate is a genuinely valuable concept. I read an article recently (possibly here?) about someone working on glasses that the users could adjust themselves, eliminating the need for an optometrist. He's trying to get these distributed on a really wide scale in countries which are too poor to afford optometry, because failing eyesight stops a great many from being able to work.

> So obviously some people are escaping the stupid, impoverished culture.

Individuals definitely do rise up from poverty, but that's a sociological rarity. Most people who grow up poor among other poor folks are indoctrinated into the idea that this is just how it is. It's extremely rare to find a poor person who's able to step back from all that and defiantly work his way up.

> I think that in Atlas Rand does abandon villains, but I feel that's because she's relying on her readers to have read The Fountainhead so we can already understand their justifications.

It's been a while since I read Fountainhead, but the only prominent villains I remember are Keating and Toohey. They seemed to be remarkably capable men, but Keating sabotaged his potential by constantly seeking others' approval. Toohey, I guess, was supposed to be the apotheosis of that mindset.

I'm thinking more about, say, the jaded bum from Atlas Shrugged, or the workers who don't have a love of what they do and aren't highly competent at it. Rand seems pretty happy to just treat them all with contempt, rather than understand where they're coming from and why.

Things that immediately stood out as different:

- 3 Rand books in the top 6? Really?

- 2 Scientology / Anti Psychology books near the top (#2, #11)

A look at the fiction list reveals the same bias:

Top 10 from the 'Novels List'

  ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand
  THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand
  BATTLEFIELD EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
  THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien
  TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
  1984 by George Orwell
  ANTHEM by Ayn Rand
  WE THE LIVING by Ayn Rand
  MISSION EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
  FEAR by L. Ron Hubbard

A Dance with Dragons, George R. R. Martin, is the Tolkien of our times, but with a dark and raunchy twist ;-) Almost finished; book 6 is a year or more away if previous publishing trend continues -- we needs it ;-(

From the introduction written in "The Fountainhead":

"Was The Fountainhead written for the purpose of presenting my philosophy? ... This is the motive and purpose of my writing: the projection of an ideal man. The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal ... Let me stress this: my purpose is NOT the philosophical enlightenment of my readers..."

...and so forth. Emphasis was hers, BTW. Having read both "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead", I didn't need to read an author's introduction to know that they were both simply works of fiction intended to glorify ideas that she thought were important. What's most frustrating is the way people conflate those ideas; the notion of a society without any regulation at all was only a minor element in a work of fiction intended to describe this complete exaltation of creativity.

I would have expected that reverence for the creative human spirit would be better received here.

Rand was a philosopher-writer. She wrote two famous books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which codify her philosophy, Objectivism. Objectivism has Man as a divinely rational, self-interested, high-achieving capitalist at its center. According to Objectivism, this is what you must strive for, and society must not get in the way (Laissez-faire). She also has a special take on gender relations, for example all her protagonists, both male and female, are single rich genius capitalist workaholics who don't have children since they have no time for such matters.

Although her books (and philosophy) are somewhat simple and two dimensional, it's still interesting to read and ponder, so she became somewhat rich and famous. This led to her ego going into orbit, so eventually a cult around her formed, and apparently she became a bit difficult, casting out members who didn't agree with her, including her lover(s).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

Rand was a philosopher-writer. She wrote two famous books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which codify her philosophy, Objectivism. Objectivism has Man as a divinely rational, self-interested, high-achieving capitalist at its center. According to Objectivism, this is what you must strive for, and society must not get in the way (Laissez-faire). She also has a special take on gender relations, for example all her protagonists, both male and female, are single, rich, genius, capitalist workaholics working as solitary inventor-engineers who don't have children since they have no time for such matters.

Although her books (and philosophy) are somewhat simple and two dimensional, it's still interesting to read and ponder, so she became somewhat rich and famous. This led to her ego lifting off and reaching orbit, so eventually a cult around her formed, and apparently she became a bit difficult, casting out members who didn't agree with her, including her lover(s).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

"The Fountainhead" - gave me the gift of self-confidence

"The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution" - helps me understand where I come from and where I fit in the Biosphere

"The Use of Knowledge in Society" - This, along with other pieces on economics and capitalist anarchism, gave me an appreciation for distributed non-hierarchical systems. (http://www.econlib.org/Library/Essays/hykKnw1.html)

Paul Graham's stuff - Got me to the point where I'm quitting my job in two weeks.

I read a ton of fantasy, sci fi, and historical fiction growing up. I'm sure that has something to do with my grand imagination, distaste for authority, and idealism.

This is the country that has spawned the richest people on the planet, many of them from very lowly backgrounds. The most influential web sites on the planet came from the
United States. The greatest TV shows I've seen were all but one American, and the one - The Office - managed to at least win Ricky Gervais an Emmy once he brought it over here. Ditto greatest movies. In almost every field, America has got at least a distinctive presence. So obviously some people are escaping the stupid, impoverished culture.

I think that in Atlas Rand does abandon villains, but I feel that's because she's relying on her readers to have read The Fountainhead so we can already understand their justifications. In that earlier book, she spends a lot of time treating her villains with sympathy. She tries to explain why they are what they are. And while I agree that she does simplify in Atlas, I've absolutely met people who have similar mindsets to the villains from The Fountainhead - she's not just making up that type of person, and they often are as vile and as insignificant as she paints them to be.

But I don't think modern readers of Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Anthem, et al., are listening to her as a preacher, to apply her ideas to the entirety of their lives, but rather as inspiration for their own philosophy. That is, after all, one reason to read literature that challenges your opinions.

That's why I read and appreciate Rand. It's not because the American Libertarian movement made her a mascot.

Take her introduction to The Fountainhead that she wrote in 1968, years after it was published and became successful:

> It is not in the nature of man--nor of any living entity--to start out by giving up, by spitting in
one's own face and damning existence; that requires a process of corruption whose rapidity
differs from man to man. Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run
down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it.
Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of their elders who tell them persistently that
maturity consists of abandoning one's mind; security, of abandoning one's values; practicality,
of losing self-esteem. Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that that fire is not to be
betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose and reality. But whatever their future, at the
dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.
There are very few guideposts to find. The Fountainhead is one of them.
This is one of the cardinal reasons of The Fountainhead's lasting appeal: it is a confirmation of
the spirit of youth, proclaiming man's glory, showing how much is possible.

By posting this I hope to defend Rand in the sense of helping people realize she does more then what the modern political landscape has created for her. I was certainly inspired by her approach to self, as I imagine countless others have been.

But I don't think that, in a free country, the government should be monitoring people solely for their political views or what kind of books they read, without some actual evidence that they're a danger to anyone. Sure, maybe someone who buys an Ayn Rand book will eventually work to eliminate government, but I'm not sure owning The Fountainhead should land you on a watchlist; and the same should go for reading Proudhon or Kropotkin.

It's also really easy to run into false positives. In the '80s/'90s, for example, the police/media liked to paint a bunch of generally harmless BBSing kids as "dangerous anarchists" because they had an ASCII file of The Anarchist Cookbook—which is violent anarchist literature, after all.

But the hate is mostly for the ideas, not the writing. The worlds are certainly fictional. Things are not as black and white as she paints them. The heroes are small minority of supremely talented, hard-working people battling bureaucracy and incompetence. Rand assumes everyone is born on a level playing field and the choices people may determine where they land.

My advice is that anyone Atlas Shrugged is a must read for anyone with an ounce of entrepreneurial spirit. Take it with a grain of salt though.

Some other books that I find deserving of the at least occasional re-read (if not yearly)

The Soul of a New Machine - Kidder

Hackers - Levy

False Memory - Dean Koontz

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Neuromancer - William Gibson

Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell

The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne

If you like those, check out some of her nonfiction books: The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, Philosophy: Who Needs It, and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (these are but a few - Rand wrote a long series of nonfiction books).

Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist by Tara Smith (a philosophy professor at UT-Austin) is excellent because it unpacks Ayn Rand's ethical system in an academic style. Finally, Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand gives a comprehensive view of Rand's entire philosophy.

Light reading (not by Objectivist authors, and not in any particular order):

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner

The Soul of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James Watson

What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynman

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynman

Well, if you want to be sure, read The Fountainhead and Atlash Shrugged.

The Fountainhead is actually an explicit repudiation of Neitzche (though it is more than that).

There is a Nietzschean hero in the book---and he is driven almost to suicide, and is completely destroyed.

Rand greatly admired one aspect of Hickman: that he wasn't influenced by other people; he was fully himself. The actual hero of The Fountainhead is like that, but rather than being a destructive parasite (of self and others), he uses his independence to achieve real goals and values in life in a way that does not vicitimize anyone.

He did blow up Cortlandt Homes; importantly, nobody was in the building and nobody was harmed, and he did it because the plans for the building were essentially stolen from him. He does it to make a point, which he does make.

Rand was constructing ... essentially Russian novels against the concept of collectivism. It's not particularly complete work. It's essentially propaganda.

And like it or not, her side in the debate mostly won. But that has nearly nothing to do with our present state of affairs - the headcount of Randians among SiVa is probably higher than in the economy at large.

I always like to think Ayn Rand's selfish desires and socialism could work together. Just think of taxes going to reasonable causes (such as infrastructure or health care) as forced self-interest :)

"How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, because it changed my understanding of people for the better.

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" by Richard Feynman, because it gave me a model for how to enjoy life.

"Models" by Mark Manson, because it helped shape my understanding of heterosexual relationships.

"An Introduction to General Systems Thinking" by Gerald Weinberg, because it illuminates the general laws underlying all systems.

Fiction:

"Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert A Heinlein, because it showed me a philosophy and "spirituality", for lack of a better word, that I could agree with.

"The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand, because they showed me how human systems break, and they provided human models for how to see and live in, through, and past those broken systems.

"Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" by Eliezer Yudkowsky, because it set the bar (high) for all future fiction, especially when it comes to the insightful portrayal of the struggle between good and evil.

On the other hand, for well-adjusted folks, taking the book literally, is a recipe for overcompensating.

But as for how the characters behaved and reacted to each other, it seemed too robot-like and lacking empathy that The Fountainhead, for example, literally had me tossing the book across the room multiple times.

"Real people don't act like that!" I remembered saying. And that was in high school, when I was Libertarian. I still finished the book though.

If someone wants to check her out, I think Anthem is the one to read. You get all of her ideas, pretty much, with the bonus of being able to get through it in a few hours. Her other books are way too long-winded. The Fountainhead, despite being infuriating and having some excessive diatribes, I did think was a good book overall.

Personally, of all the high school reading I did, Walden had a much more lasting effect on me than Ayn Rand did.

The Selfish Gene - Dawkins

A New Kind of Science - Wolfram

The Singularity is Near - Kurzweil

Gödel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter

Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies - Hofstadter

Atlas Shrugged - Rand

The Fountainhead - Rand

Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell

The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin

Time Reborn - Lee Smolin

Ambient Findability - Peter Morville

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software - Steven Johnson

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age - Duncan Watts

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life - Albert-laszlo Barabasi

Artificial Life - Steven Levy

The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank

The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman

not a book, but the various writings of Douglas Engelbart - http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/library.html

Glasshouse - Charles Stross

Permutation City - Greg Egan

Neuromancer - William Gibson

The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner

The Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky

The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What it Means for Business and Society - Eric Beinhocker

The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Personally, though, I find the "selfish jerk" thing more as a result of "The Fountainhead" than "Atlas Shrugged," though at the same time, I think TF is the right book to read before AS. TF prepares you for the "self", while AS applies all that to society.

All that said, while Atlas Shrugged can be an extremely depressing book (the constant feeling of "How can this get worse" coupled with the inevitable "Oh, this is how"), it's also a very uplifting book. After almost every reading session with AS, I found myself with a burning desire to work, to improve my business, to "go get it" and seize life. The heroes resonate very well with those who absolutely love their work.

The only other book that has come close to as uplifting a feeling as Atlas Shrugged (for me) is Founders at Work, because many of the people interviewed in that book share the same passion for their work as the heroes in AS, and pull off monumental achievements.

Will the movie be any good? I'm not holding my breath, but I'd love to see someone like Cate Blanchett play Dagny.

1. Black Like Me - John Howard Griffin -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Like_Me

2. More Matrix and Philosophy - William Irwin (ed) - https://www.amazon.com/More-Matrix-Philosophy-Revolutions-Re...

3. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

4. The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Jim_Crow

5. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal - Ayn Rand - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0451147952/ref=sspa_dk_detail_4?ps...

6. The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountainhead

7. The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect - Judea Pearl - https://www.amazon.com/Book-Why-Science-Cause-Effect/dp/0465...

8. The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg - https://www.amazon.com/Education-Millionaires-Everything-Col...

9. The Silent Corner, The Whispering Room, and The Crooked Staircase - Dean Koontz - http://www.deankoontz.com/book-series/jane-hawk

10. Godel's Proof - Ernest Nagel & James Newman - https://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6dels-Proof-Ernest-Nagel/dp/081...

11. After Dark - Haruki Murakami - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17803.After_Dark

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." [1]

I am hopeful for any social discussion of character.

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Rogers

Most people lose their adoration when they find that actually doing things is hard and takes actual, you know, work. Some don't, because they have discovered that not doing anything does not keep one from fantasizing about having done it.

1) Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos by Michio Kaku

2) The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (I haven't read Atlas Shrugged yet. So cannot compare them.)

Yesterday I finished Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and it is a very good book too.

Currently reading: What They Teach you at Harvard Business School: My Two Years Inside the Cauldron of Capitalism by Philip Delves Broughton

– Corey Robin in "The Reactionary Mind"

That said, the actual quality of writing in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead is frankly god-awful. If you're making a canon full of books that exemplify the craft of written storytelling, Atlas Shrugged would be sitting somewhere behind the Twilight novels.

For a quick 1-hour introduction, see this Dave Rubin interview with Yaron Brook:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=089xOB9bbhU

For fiction illustrating the principles, you could read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged.

https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Shrugged-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191145...

https://www.amazon.com/Fountainhead-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191153/

Or for non-fiction, try The Virtue of Selfishness.

https://www.amazon.com/Virtue-Selfishness-Fiftieth-Anniversa...

Or if you prefer podcasts addressing practical questions, try The Peikoff Podcasts:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/peikoff-com-q-a-on-ayn-r...

Or search for specific questions here

http://www.peikoff.com/podcasts/

"The Fountainhead" was made into a movie in 1949. It's a decent movie, and Amazon has the DVD. It's amusing today because the protagonist, who is an architect, designs buildings that he insists are insanely great, but are just slab-sided office blocks. (His hatred of decorative spires has something going for it. There used to be a thing for putting useless pointy spires on top of office buildings, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building being the classic examples. That's mostly died out in the US, although it still has a following in Dubai and some Asian cities.)

Taking Ayn Rand seriously is not good for you.

Rand never posited that people are born productive. Productive people are productive by virtue of doing things, in Ayn's world...while a lot of other people are envious of the doing and stand in their way. People can become productive. Individualism requires that people can do whatever it is they want to do, as long as it doesn't harm another. Rand wasn't talking about what childhood occurrences make for a Galt or a Roarke. Perhaps she believed they were pre-destined, but I can't think of a single instance where that was indicated in her writing (and I went through a two year Rand phase in college...I've read just about everything she ever wrote). And certainly not in Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead.

Gladwell, on the other hand, is saying that people we view as stars in their field are sometimes given a more obvious path to becoming stars than others, and thus things society does can help or hinder people who would be productive. I don't think Rand would argue that there aren't people in the world who can help you as well as people in the world who can hinder you.

Note that I'm not making any judgment call on either idea. I'm just not seeing how anyone could come away thinking this article is a useful addition to the subject (or subjects, in this case, since there are two under discussion, and somehow the author believes they contradict one another). I agree with others that this is blogspam, making use of hot button names like Gladwell and Rand. It's almost as if they have a machine that churns out high hit ideas...

It's important, I've found, not to mistake Rand's works for wholesale reality. She makes some incredibly good points, and I love her concept of the virtue of selfishness, but things are more complex than she writes about. She was aware of this too: her books are deliberately overstated in order to drive her points home. The economy, along with people in general, is more complex than headlines might make it seem.

> Evolution designed them to accept cultural assumptions

It's a bit presumptuous to squarely pin something like that on evolution. Evolution is likely to favor many things, including individualism and rationality. Yes, Aritstotle said that man is a political animal. Yet Aristotle didn't spend time observing baboons on the plains of Ethiopia.

I'm not sure where Ayn Rand stands as a writer because her writing is hard to separate from her philosophy as she chose writing as a tool to transmit her philosophical beliefs. I also loved Roark in the Fountainhead (yet I tend to identify more with her imperfect characters like Gail Wynand), and as I'm currently somewhere around p.300 in Atlas Shrugged (warning: as it is a very long book, my judgement of it may easily be a wrong one), I feel that she wrote Atlas Shrugged when her mind dogmatised her beliefs (the Fountainhead, I think, was written when she was still questioning herself and reading it feels like reading a bit more honest piece to me). Despite her later dogmatism, I respect her as a philosopher because she (a) opened my eyes to how absurd Hegel-derived philosophies are, and (b) made me understand the cult of Athena in the ancient Greece and the impact it likely to have had on Western civilization. Since Ayn Rand was so much courageous philosophically than Marx, I think it would be completely unfair to everyone involved to call Marx but not Rand a philosopher.

> an isolated human is weak and vulnerable

Not really, unless you immerse him/her into an unfamiliar society. Although I'm not a follower of Thoreau, I think he made a fair argument that it is not at all unhealthy to live outside of society. Now I'm not an advocate of moving into a cabin in the woods, I just wanted to point out that there exists a different perspective.

> leaving society amounts to suicide

No, leaving a society is much more like quitting cocaine than committing suicide. Society is a lot like a drug. It takes some time to become hooked, but once you do, it seems nigh impossible to leave. Hence the recent success of Facebook.

Brevity is one of the virtues of great literature. You'll probably learn that as you grow older and time becomes more valuable to you. Certainly, great literature can be long (Middlesex is perhaps the best novel of the past 20 years, and it weighs in at a pretty hefty 556 pages...this is still significantly shorter than Atlas), but Atlas Shrugged, as art, suffers under the weight of the philosophical treatise that it's carrying around on its back (much like the mythic Atlas, and yes, I believe he should shrug off all that extra weight).

The Fountainhead is somewhat less marred by needless words, but only Anthem is actually free of cruft, in my opinion.

"Her objectivist philosophy may be a bit overt in the latter, but never for a second could I sleep well knowing I'd proposed that others -skip- these books."

People who like what they find in the shorter Rand books will go on to read the others. People who get stuck in the mud of Galt's speech will never pickup another Rand book. That speech is simply terrible literature. It might be good philosophy, but it's not good art.

The idea of designing products for yourself, that YOU want, not for a committee and not for the masses - and of loyalty to the central idea of the product all the way through. The idea of a man who is religious about his work - but who is not actually religious. Building something in your own image - for Roark, it was actual buildings; for Jobs, as has been said, it was Apple.

- La Zone du dehors by Alain Damasio, a french author. I must admit I liked his more recent book, La Horde du Contrevent, a lot more. Sadly, it is not available in English. Read it if you understand French and like SF.

- Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny (finishing the 9th book). It's a good story, but not a must-read.

- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Liked the first 150 pages I read.

- Cryptography Engineering by Niels Ferguson, Bruce Schneier, and Tadayoshi Kohno. I'm learning tons about cryptography.

- The Non-Designer's Design Book (3rd edition) by Robin Williams. Only read a few chapters, but I'm learning a lot about design. Very simple principles that change everything.

- Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman & Nat Pryce. I decided to go with this book instead of reading Beck's book on TDD. I'm learning / revisiting a lot of best practices from TDD masters. I recommend it to Java Developers (once they have read Effective Java, of course).

I still have a lot to read (
http://i.imgur.com/lgpjf.jpg and http://www.google.com/buzz/neveue/Kc4GhaSSoLE/Un-weekend-pro... ), and am looking forward to it :)

I anyone is interested, I've spent some time researching (on HN, StackOverflow, and other communities) about design & UX, Linux & System administration, and programming. Here's the list I ended up with: http://www.google.com/buzz/neveue/NBBSEryBonS/Woot-ordering-...

From what I have experienced (and I have read through The Fountainhead in its entirety), the whole "we're going to take your products, the fruits of your efforts, and release them from your possession for all of the public world to get their hands on" thing (I understand that Rand is dead), the private/public possession dichotomy, just seems so counter to a lot of what the book espouses.

Just my personal reaction.

Its the same reason for Bezos' purchase of the Washington Post.... having a media outlet gives you political power.

> There are undoubtedly myriad intellectual, psychological, and political sources for our inaction, but I cannot help thinking that the influence of Ayn Rand, the Russian émigré novelist, may have played a role. Rand’s disquisitions on the “virtue of selfishness” and unbridled capitalism are admired by many American politicians and economists—Paul Ryan, Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, Andrew Puzder, and Donald Trump, among them. Trump, who has called “The Fountainhead” his favorite book, said that the novel “relates to business and beauty and life and inner emotions. That book relates to . . . everything.” Long after Rand’s death, in 1982, the libertarian gospel of the novel continues to sway our politics: Government is bad. Solidarity is a trap. Taxes are theft.

Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

The Game - Neil Strauss

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank

Business @ The Speed of Thought - Bill Gates

The Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki

Not sure where you got that. All of my posts on this topic should make clear that I'm a very big Rand fan, and have read all of her books (really, all of them). I would never call myself a SOME-PERSONS-NAMEian of any sort, so perhaps that's the difference. I do sometimes refer to myself as an anarcho-capitalist, so, philosophically, your Rothbardian views and mine probably coincide more than they differ. ;-)

I actually did enjoy Atlas Shrugged. But the speech is too much, the book too long (by about half), and the characters are weak (for such a long book). When I first started reading Rand, I wanted to share her books with everybody. So I recommended Atlas, her opus, to everybody I knew. None of them made it through the book. All got bogged down in the speech, and either gave up, or skimmed the rest of it. Even people who were reasonably heavy readers (though mostly pulp) still couldn't stomach the whole thing. I started recommending Anthem after that, and everybody made it through...everybody enjoyed it...and some went on to read other Rand books (I recommend The Fountainhead next).

I still believe that intelligent people can get everything they really need to know about Rand's philosophy from Anthem. And, of course, dumb folks can actually read Anthem, understand it, and enjoy it.

But, you're definitely weird to think "Catcher in the Rye" is shallow. Perhaps you like a lot of words in your stories. I don't. Word of advice: Stay away from Hemingway, you won't like it.

I've read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged too, but it was a while ago.