What I just said to my wife

“Hallelujah—I have finished that damned book.”

One or two people may remember that I mentioned a month or so ago that I was reading a very long novel but didn’t want to name it until I had finished it. It was Atlas Shrugged. I’ve been wanting for some time to read it because it’s apparently very influential, and I wanted to know why. The fact that my daughter had been assigned to read it for an economics class brought a copy into the house conveniently. I can now report that it’s awful, really awful, but that I’m still not sure why it’s so influential. That sucker is almost 1200 pages long—1200 fairly well-packed pages, around 645,000 words according to a couple of references turned up by Google—and most of it is astonishingly tiresome. I can’t believe that a large number of people have liked it enough to plow through till the end.

I’ll have more, lots more, to say about it later, probably not till next Sunday.