Is "The Fountainhead" worth reading?

>virtue of selfishness
Great choice. Philosophy Who Needs it is another good non-fiction. (First half of essays are better than last half. Also, lots of great quotes to use for essays in this book, so highlight it up!)

We the Living was a shorter fiction - one of her earlier books, so not as developed, but for anyone who is afraid of the commitment, if you were to read We The Living and Virtue of Selfishness, I'm confident you'd b able to drive in Atlas Shrugged.

it might be good to read just to see if you're the kind of person who goes in for that sort of thing

Yes, just for the final speech by Ellsworth Toohey.

In the amount of time you would spend reading a Rand book, you could read literally anything else. She's modern American conservationism for retards. Read Robert Nozick.

awesome book OP. It literally changed my life. I always felt really bad for others that they fucked things up so I never wanted to show my potential around them - which eventually led to me not showing my potential ever, for the sake of everyone else's feelings. Well fuck that shit, right now I don't budge whenever I'm right. I'm not very fun at parties but at least I'm true to myself and that shit is the real high.

I think she had autism

is this real?

That's enough for me not to read her.

I read it then wondered why I bothered. I don't even like modern architecture. It's so long winded and basically just says individual excellence is more important than collective goals as individual achievement raises the quality of life of everyone in the society. And that media is false and ran by agenda driven Jews or by weird shit peddlers.

Oh yeah and a weird rape scene just in the middle of it.

No.

I read it as a freshman in college. It was OKAY. I'm glad I read it, but it's unlikely I'd reread it.

There is so, so very much out there that's more worth the time

Read We the Living instead. It doesn't play in some idealized parallel or future scenario, but is based on her own experiences in the Soviet Union. In my opinion it's critical to understand her perspective and then you can just skip all the other trash she wrote.

She's not even the most worthwhile 20th-century Russian-born American writer
That distinction of course belongs to Sergei Dovlatov

It's like taking a nice big shit.

i read it in HS and although i recognized its flaws it still had somewhat of an impact on me, and im not an atheist nor do i believe in the free market as the ultimate good.

if youre going to read one of her works, make it this one.

Read Anthem. You'll get the same story and save yourself 450+ pages of drivel.

Yeah, let's say you don't buy into the selfish is virtue. The subversive characters like Toohey and society's satisfaction with mediocrity are worth reading about. The way Toohey speaks mimics with the current politically correct msm. Mediocrity is a pernicious decay on a person's soul.

>contrarian choice in spoilers
Important does not mean best. If their work is meaningless to the majority then it cannot be important, no matter how good.

You took that comment just a wee bit too seriously
Also if you're that quick to dismiss Dovlatov then you're missing out

>dude, individual rights
>lmao, gas native americans, arabs, and gays

If you're anti commie, you get away with a lot.

>lazy shitposting

Kys, my man.

back when lit was good ayn rand posting was strickly forbidden

i miss those times

Why tough? It's not like Ayn Rand is hurting anyone. Although you may not agree with her, she still is a novelist with influence to this day, so she should be discussed on this board.

yes

taking ab ig shit is like cumming for me, so ippp

It's decent storywise though the whole
>OMG THIS GUY IS MAKING ME LITERALLY SHAKE BY HOW AWESOME HE IS
really gets annoying really fast.

There are some actual good characters.
Atlas Shrugged is also worth reading but only for the first 300 pages or so. Until the part where Dagny decides to leave her company. The rest is just shit and filler. The Galt speech is preachy as fuck, but makes a lot more sense once you imagine that Rand is talking directly to people the internet refers to as marxist ''SJW''.

I've read worst.

>that literal no argument
>it's so shit that it's like shit author X is like good author X
Such bantz.

Yeah, it's a good read if you work in any technical-creative field. If her philosophy is your cup of tea that's another story, despite what some asstards think you can like an author but still disagree in their political views.

watch the movie instead, it's a favorite by The Sniffer

It's funny that the things people complain the most about are her political views.

I think he secretly loves Ayn Rand because he understand that she represents the idealized whole of capitalism, the enemy of communism.

Ayn Rand is extremely polarizing. As a Libertarian myself I don't even agree on most of what she says.

I'm more in the opposite camp. I agree with almost everything she says but I consider myself centralist and she would hate me for compromising. But I also understand that her views are mostly utopian in nature and wouldn't work it their entirety.
Still, I respect and admire everything she argued for on an individualistic level.

it's her most fun read

it's far less noisome than Shrugged because her philosophy is applied to aesthetics. the main boss wants to destroy innovation and formalize creative production so that none may aspire to greater heights than the least is capable of, but Roark is having none of it. he gets all blowy-uppy when the apparatchik try and put the clamp down on him

>I agree with almost everything she says but I consider myself centralist and she would hate me for compromising.

Yes, I feel similarly. However, I imagine she owuld be pragmatic and understand the needs for some compromising. That's part of being an individual, right?

"I vow to never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another live for the sake of mine"...? or some shit. lol
The power of the individual is that you can have absolutes (Live for youself) with the variety of acceptable actions through individuality.

>That's part of being an individual, right?
Exactly. People often complain that her objectivism system is very rigid but it's the opposite. All she says is that the only thing you should highly value as your ultimate value is your life and must defend it at all cost. And the goal of life is just to be happy. Every other value can be placed in a hierarchy of value. It's why a person can highly value truth over honor, and someone else might have the opposite. She's like Striner in that sense except he goes full moral nihilistic.
She even says it's fine if a person loves someone and has that person as their ultimate value that supersedes their own life. So, basically, any system would work under the Objectivism system.

>"I vow to never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another live for the sake of mine"...? or some shit. lol
That's kinda her point. You either don't give a fuck about anyone else or treat people whom you find interesting or can provide you with something as equals. It's a bit too rational and self centered but it's based on pure singular individualism. It's where she differs from Nietzsche who views everything in terms of power. Her main criticism of Nietzsche is that the weak will resent the strong and the strong are fueled by the weak whom they gain their power. You should only have cooperation or ignorance, not hierarchies of power.

I still think that We the Living is her most emotionally powerful work, you can really tell how much she despised her own home country (totalitarianism in general) by reading that.