The books you hated!

[Statius]

I don't want to detract from the value you took from the book... buuut.. *breathes in*

The characters are dull and flat. Howard Roarke, Rand's Gary Dreamboat (and allegedly a fictional stand in for the man she was having an affair with while writing Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) is an obnoxiously dull GQ-esque intellectual macho man, and morally problematic (Andrew Tate, eat your heart out).

Dominique is dull, and a thinly veiled stand-in for the author… not a Mary Sue but something approximating that.

Ellsworth Toohey is a dull strawman.

There’s no nuance to the story. Characters are righteous or they’re terrible, and when they're righteous then rape is their right, evidently.

Which brings me to... Howard Roarke raping Dominique. I don’t see how anyone who has read that scene could defend his action, and yes there are a lot of defenders out there lol. Rape by engraved invitation is still (spoiler alert) rape.
Did Dominique enjoy it despite not giving consent? Sure. There’s no denying that. Why else would she keep going back to beg for more dick while publicly repudiating the rapist (not for rape mind you, but for being a maverick)? But therein lies the problem. Rand has always made it clear that her MCs are not realistic men, but ideal men. She also made it clear that that she believes her worldview to be morally superior to all others. Fountainhead was meant, in Rand's own words, to depict "individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man's soul." In other words, selfishness is a moral imperative. To rape is a selfish act indeed.

The thing is, I don't necessarily see any moral conviction behind the rape scene. not one that stands up to a good faith test of objectivism anyways. An objectivist can say that rape is wrong and I'll believe them. What it is, however, is an erotic fantasy. Dominique Francon is Ayn Rand. Howard Roarke is Nathaniel Branden, the man with whom Ayn Rand was having an affair, and Ayn Rand has a kink. I think that's not hard to see. But she dresses her kink as philosophy, and that's why I hate it.

Fair enough if you enjoyed the book, especially for other aspects I have not considered. Please don't let me or anyone else say you're not allowed to. Would love to hear dissenting opinions.

I do want to be clear, in case I wasn't. I do not agree or endorse everything Ayn Rand said; I cannot accept rape in any context, including the way LitE accepts it, ie: mind control, woman enjoying it, CNC, what have you. I avoid real life depictions of violence almost to an extreme.

Yes, most of her characters are flat and definitely come off as charictatures. She was fictionalizing her philosophy in every work of fiction she wrote. In my opinion, she was defining in Howard Roarke what it means to be an individual in society; do I agree with how she defined that? No. It's her idealized version, as all philosophies are idealized. It's unrealistic and impossible to live that way. Not only idealized, btw, but to the extreme as well. I knew it then and I know it now.

However that book did define things for me by spelling it out when I was 16/17 and couldn't quite define what it meant to me to be an individual, free thinking person. It gave me a basis, a starting point if you will, to define it for myself.

And also want to say, not starting an argument, I agree with you on what you said. And her politics/ economics as defined in Atlas Shrugged lacks reality and compassion.

Also her men, as you aptly said (eat your heart out Andrew Tate - loved that line, good one) is on point. She promoted Alpha male syndrome, which to me is a false construct and doesn't actually exist in a balanced mind.

Whew. I hope we haven't started another debate throwing another thread off it's rails!

 

[Statius]

Hated Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield is/was a little shit.

Holden Caufield is a shit, and although it's not quite white male savior syndrome, it's close.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

Whew. I hope we haven't started another debate throwing another thread off it's rails!

I don't think its throwing the thread off the rail. Au contraire. I made a bold statement (Fountainhead sucks) without realizing the spirit of the thread, which is to explain why I think Fountainhead sucks.
And you, rightfully, brought that to my attention

 

[Statius]

I don't think its throwing the thread off the rail. Au contraire. I made a bold statement (Fountainhead sucks) without realizing the spirit of the thread, which is to explain why Fountainhead sucks.
And you, rightfully, brought that to my attention

And you made valid and accurate points. But I didn't keep with the spirit by trashing War and Peace, or Atlas Shrugged, at least until my last post. So I'll say it now for War and Peace.

Wandering, meandering, pointlessness for most of it. I almost feel like the structure, if you can call it that, was practice for Anna Karenina, which is brilliantly put together and the reason I love that book so much.

 

[ColtonWrites]

Mmm yeah, that's right. I guess that's not the one he meant.

Yeaaaaah those are only different in....every possible way, lol


I'm struggling to come up with a well-known title I "hated". I didnt enjoy Crime and Punishment - but tbf I was 14 when I tried to read it.
Oh! I hated "The Scarlet Letter"! Fantastic premise - forbidden love, betrayal, generational social stigma! And the author drags it out - theres a whole page describing a door frame. Theres an entire chapter of picking flowers. Show me the juicy stuff!

 

[Rob_Royale]

For me it was one particular author. Dean Koontz. After discovering SK in the early nineties, I dove headfirst into the horror fiction of the day including Robert McCammon. John Saul, Brian Lumley, Clive Barker and Koontz.
Koontz is a very good writer, but fuck, he cannot end a story to save his life. So many stories rise and rise and reach their peak and then the book is over in five pages. I have not read anything from him in a decade or more, so perhaps he's improved. I once sent a fan email to the address offered on his webpage and called his endings 'ejaculation without 'orgasm'. I did not receive a reply.

 

[Statius]

Hunchhback of Notre Dame

 

[SimonDoom]

For me it was one particular author. Dean Koontz. After discovering SK in the early nineties, I dove headfirst into the horror fiction of the day including Robert McCammon. John Saul, Brian Lumley, Clive Barker and Koontz.
Koontz is a very good writer, but fuck, he cannot end a story to save his life. So many stories rise and rise and reach their peak and then the book is over in five pages. I have not read anything from him in a decade or more, so perhaps he's improved. I once sent a fan email to the address offered on his webpage and called his endings 'ejaculation without 'orgasm'. I did not receive a reply.

I haven't read many Koontz books, but I recall one I enjoyed -- Intensity. It's about a young woman who gets involved in a cat-and-mouse struggle with a serial killer. I thought it was quite good. Suspenseful, well-paced. The ending had a fun twist regarding the identity of the serial killer.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

I have ranted here before about how I despise The Stand.

--Annie

 

[Rob_Royale]

I haven't read many Koontz books, but I recall one I enjoyed -- Intensity. It's about a young woman who gets involved in a cat-and-mouse struggle with a serial killer. I thought it was quite good. Suspenseful, well-paced. The ending had a fun twist regarding the identity of the serial killer.

Don't get me wrong, he is a very good writer who can spin a great story. It's just how brief and unsatisfying I have found a number of his endings, that got me riled enough to throw the paperback across a room.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

Koontz is a very good writer, but fuck, he cannot end a story to save his life.

 

[SimonDoom]

The hate for Catcher in the Rye is interesting to me. I like that book. Holden Caulfield is a shit, but that's the point. He's not an idealized narrator/hero. As a character he's selfish and self-absorbed and unstable, and as a narrator he's unreliable. But that's a key part of the effectiveness of the story. It's what made it such a phenomenon. Millions of disaffected young people in the stifling, rah-rah culture of mid-20th century America read that book and thought, "Here's somebody even more fucked up and more pissed off about everything than I am." That sort of book has been a lot more common since then, but it wasn't common in those days.

 

[RoperTrace]

Gatsby is on my 'most boring books of all time' list. Never understood the hype.
Twilight is just bad writing, I never got past the first chapters.
But Fifty Shades of Gray I absolutely hate. It has nothing whatsoever to do with BDSM, it's about abuse and domestic violence.

Agree, and agree on both.

 

[SimonDoom]

I don't want to detract from the value you took from the book... buuut.. *breathes in*

The characters are dull and flat. Howard Roarke, Rand's Gary Dreamboat (and allegedly a fictional stand in for the man she was having an affair with while writing Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) is an obnoxiously dull GQ-esque intellectual macho man, and morally problematic (Andrew Tate, eat your heart out).

Dominique is dull, and a thinly veiled stand-in for the author… not a Mary Sue but something approximating that.

Ellsworth Toohey is a dull strawman.

There’s no nuance to the story. Characters are righteous or they’re terrible, and when they're righteous then rape is their right, evidently.

Which brings me to... Howard Roarke raping Dominique. I don’t see how anyone who has read that scene could defend his action, and yes there are a lot of defenders out there lol. Rape by engraved invitation is still (spoiler alert) rape.
Did Dominique enjoy it despite not giving consent? Sure. There’s no denying that. Why else would she keep going back to beg for more dick while publicly repudiating the rapist (not for rape mind you, but for being a maverick)? But therein lies the problem. Rand has always made it clear that her MCs are not realistic men, but ideal men. She also made it clear that that she believes her worldview to be morally superior to all others. Fountainhead was meant, in Rand's own words, to depict "individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man's soul." In other words, selfishness is a moral imperative. To rape is a selfish act indeed.

The thing is, I don't necessarily see any moral conviction behind the rape scene. not one that stands up to a good faith test of objectivism anyways. An objectivist can say that rape is wrong and I'll believe them. What it is, however, is an erotic fantasy. Dominique Francon is Ayn Rand. Howard Roarke is Nathaniel Branden, the man with whom Ayn Rand was having an affair, and Ayn Rand has a kink. I think that's not hard to see. But she dresses her kink as philosophy, and that's why I hate it.

Fair enough if you enjoyed the book, especially for other aspects I have not considered. Please don't let me or anyone else say you're not allowed to. Would love to hear dissenting opinions.

All good points. My reaction to Ayn Rand's novels is divided. On the one hand, everything you say is correct. The characters are cartoonish, and the prose often has a kind of overly hard-boiled Mickey Spillane, tough-guy style. Everything is overdone. The philosophy is half-baked, too. Rand's ideas about men and women and sex are bizarre. There are a lot of weird dominance-submission currents in her writing. Rand, I think, was a very unself-aware writer.

But on the other hand, if, like me as a 19-year-old, years ago, when I read Atlas Shrugged, you don't take left-wing orthodoxy seriously, you find socialistic preachings tedious, and you're looking for an alternative, her stories, as nutty as they are, offered a fun, totally unique, if not entirely serious, splash of contrarian sunlight in the darkness. I enjoyed the first two-thirds of Atlas Shrugged, until the central question, "Who is John Galt?" was answered. After that it became preachier and less interesting. I agreed with parts of it and thought the other parts were nuts, but fun in their own way. It's not great literature or great philosophy. I read it as speculative fiction, the way I'd read a novel by Vonnegut or Heinlein or Orwell. You can enjoy the ride without fully buying into the program. In that vein, I found elements of it to be enjoyable, and I enjoyed the way the novel attempted to "poke the bear" of prevailing political orthodoxy. Political bears, of whatever stripe, always deserve to be poked.

 

[lovecraft68]

I don't want to detract from the value you took from the book... buuut.. *breathes in*

The characters are dull and flat. Howard Roarke, Rand's Gary Dreamboat (and allegedly a fictional stand in for the man she was having an affair with while writing Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) is an obnoxiously dull GQ-esque intellectual macho man, and morally problematic (Andrew Tate, eat your heart out).

Dominique is dull, and a thinly veiled stand-in for the author… not a Mary Sue but something approximating that.

Ellsworth Toohey is a dull strawman.

There’s no nuance to the story. Characters are righteous or they’re terrible, and when they're righteous then rape is their right, evidently.

Which brings me to... Howard Roarke raping Dominique. I don’t see how anyone who has read that scene could defend his action, and yes there are a lot of defenders out there lol. Rape by engraved invitation is still (spoiler alert) rape.
Did Dominique enjoy it despite not giving consent? Sure. There’s no denying that. Why else would she keep going back to beg for more dick while publicly repudiating the rapist (not for rape mind you, but for being a maverick)? But therein lies the problem. Rand has always made it clear that her MCs are not realistic men, but ideal men. She also made it clear that that she believes her worldview to be morally superior to all others. Fountainhead was meant, in Rand's own words, to depict "individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man's soul." In other words, selfishness is a moral imperative. To rape is a selfish act indeed.

The thing is, I don't necessarily see any moral conviction behind the rape scene. not one that stands up to a good faith test of objectivism anyways. An objectivist can say that rape is wrong and I'll believe them. What it is, however, is an erotic fantasy. Dominique Francon is Ayn Rand. Howard Roarke is Nathaniel Branden, the man with whom Ayn Rand was having an affair, and Ayn Rand has a kink. I think that's not hard to see. But she dresses her kink as philosophy, and that's why I hate it.

Fair enough if you enjoyed the book, especially for other aspects I have not considered. Please don't let me or anyone else say you're not allowed to. Would love to hear dissenting opinions.

I think what gets lost in these takes is the tendency to apply modern society and ideals to older works. Most of what you're taking issue with was the norm in her time. We look back and see how wrong it is, but for that time period, it's accurate.

Some people have this tiresome moral superiority that has them thinking if they were back in such and such time they would be espousing 2025 ideals. Um, no, you wouldn't be, you'd have been raised like everyone else with the same experiences and social moldings.

I roll my eyes at things in older works as much as anyone, but I just look at it that that was then, this is now and I don't hold it against the author.

And of course most people aren't consistent with it. The same people with some complaints you have about behavior-which was normal back then-are the ones who slobber over Game of Thrones which is 100% abuse and misogyny, every female character that wasn't a child was shown nude, raped or beaten and some multiple times.

Now,where's all the complaints about that?

Exactly, and this is in modern times with the excuse "that's how it was" first off, you weren't there to prove that, secondly, fine, but why does that excuse work for Martin the obese pig, but not Rand or an author who did write in the time these things were how it was.

Rachel Zegler is a bigtime target for toxic male d-baggery in the world of "clears throat" movie critics. One of the comments she made that got their mom's panties they wear in an uproar was when discussing Snow White she said its not 1937 anymore. This got her hate from the cloven hooved among us, but she's not wrong. What worked in 1937 in tropes and accepted behavior is not what works now.

Original Disney movies are still iconic but some love to use the term problematic.

The people who go with that are the ones with the problem and who make it worse.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

I read it as speculative fiction, the way I'd read a novel by Vonnegut or Heinlein or Orwell. You can enjoy the ride without fully buying into the program. In that vein, I found elements of it to be enjoyable, and I enjoyed the way the novel attempted to "poke the bear" of prevailing political orthodoxy.

I think that's perhaps the most valid way of reading Ayn Rand.

I roll my eyes at things in older works as much as anyone, but I just look at it that that was then, this is now and I don't hold it against the author.

Fair enough. I should caveat that my opinion are heavily informed by years of interactions with tech bros who unironically cast themselves as Randian Übermensch (*shudders). I can't help but hold Ayn Rand accountable.

 

[Djmac1031]

Twilight is just bad writing, I never got past the first chapters.

Way back when, my teen daughter suggested I read Twilight because she knew dad liked vampire books.

I tried to read it, honestly I did. I gave up when Edward let Bella's potential rapists go without so much as a scratch. What kind of pussy ass coward vampire was this???

It was then I truly realized I was not the target audience for this nonsense.

 

[onehitwanda]

It was then I truly realized I was not the target audience for this nonsense.

Twilight is the most Mary Sue of Mary Sues ever to Mary Sue.

Edit: I think I might have managed to read a page of it, once.

Edit of the edit: I'm a simple girl. I need my gothic horror to be gothic. I need my Van Helsings, my Edward Scissorhands, my Jack and my Vlad Dracul. I need bleak forests, blood and bone and the howling of wolves at the dark of the moon.

I need witchcraft, Destiny, the Fae, and Eva Green breaking tables during seances. I need the Devil flying down the stairs during the Ninth Gate, and I need Joanna Constantine.

Twilight can get in the bin next to Eragon for if I ever run out of kindling.

 

[Djmac1031]

Twilight is the most Mary Sue of Mary Sues ever to Mary Sue.

Edit: I think I might have managed to read a page of it, once.

I still for the life of me can't figure out why immortal vampires who could go anywhere, do anything, would choose to spend their time in Boringville USA attending HIGH SCHOOL.

The whole concept was stupid AF.

but again, I wasn't the target audience. The target audience made it a bazillion dollar franchise.

So what the fuck do I know, right?

 

[onehitwanda]

I still for the life of me can't figure out why immortal vampires who could go anywhere, do anything, would choose to spend their time in Boringville USA attending HIGH SCHOOL.

The whole concept was stupid AF.

but again, I wasn't the target audience. The target audience made it a bazillion dollar franchise.

So what the fuck do I know, right?

It angers me, so I try not to think about it. It's like fifty shades of yawn, fifty yawns darker, the seeking of the book of fifty fucking yawns, and fuck off already with your yawns will you you cunt...

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

The whole concept was stupid AF.

but again, I wasn't the target audience. The target audience made it a bazillion dollar franchise.

 

[Rob_Royale]

Twilight is the most Mary Sue of Mary Sues ever to Mary Sue.

My wife read them all and I picked up the first, and couldn't get more than a chapter into it. The work was amateurish at best and I was astounded that it found a publisher like Little, Brown and Company who I'd always heard required much more developed writing chops from their clients. I guess I know where to send my first novel.

 

[Djmac1031]

I'm a simple girl. I need my gothic horror to be gothic.

EXACTLY. What was the point of making your immortal teenagers vampires if they're not gonna actually act like vampires?

I get giving them a moral code, fine. Not wanting to hurt the innocent could have made them interesting, complex.

instead it made them bland and boring as fuck.

Team Edward? Team Jacob?

I was Team Holy Water, Stake Through The Heart and Silver Bullets

 

[onehitwanda]

I was Team Holy Water, Stake Through The Heart and Silver Bullets

Silver bullets don't work. Garlic enemas, however...

 

[Djmac1031]

Silver bullets don't work. Garlic enemas, however...

Oh I meant to take out those loser werewolves too.