Reading Atlas Shrugged is an event. Why? I mean, really, it’s an iffy novel. It’s a thousand pages of iffy story, iffier characters, and come on, the climax reads like b-movie Ian Fleming. And the dry, stupid, unnecessary John Galt speech? Please. It was skim-city and I was the mayor. And yet…

Reading Atlas Shrugged is an event because it’s more than novel, it’s a philosophical treatise, it’s passion, it is an enormous literary masterpiece. It is one of the most important books ever written with some damn fine prose. Damn fine prose. I sound stuffy, like I should be smoking a pipe in front of a fireplace. Damn fine, mate, pip, pip, jolly good.

Reading Atlas Shrugged is like being strapped to chair, drenched in water, and electrocuted and brain-washed, with toothpicks keeping your eyes open for days on end like in the movie The Island from the 1980’s. It is propaganda disguised as a novel. It is probably the most subversive book I’ve ever read. It is a book that begs to be burned. It is a suicidal book. It is anti-Christian, anti-communism, anti-novella. And yet, it is inspiring. This is a book that challenges you to change, and sticks needles in your genitals to make sure that change happens. And if you resist, it fights you, fights you to read it, fights every belief you have, fights you until you are exhausted. It had to be 1000 pages. It uses every word as weapon.

If I wanted to take over a country, I would burn Atlas Shrugged, then kill all the lawyers, and then give people free Taco Bell and free cable T.V. I would rule forever.

I love to read the classic novels because they are classic for a reason. If you haven’t read Goethe’s Faust, you are cheating yourself. Don’t read this insipid blog. Go, now, find a classic book, get some coffee and read until your mind explodes.

Reading Atlas Shrugged exploded my mind. The book is simple. It repeats it’s themes over and over again. We all just have 24 hours in a day. What are you doing with your time? What are you doing to live? And what is stopping you? And if you are letting things stop you, well, I’m not. Get out of my way. I’m going for it. I’ll climb over your corpse to get there. Frak you.

Atlas Shrugged is relentless. Like I said at the beginning, it is an event. And maybe that is what literature is, en event. Not just a nice little story that grabs my little attention for a few little minutes. Man, lots of books are like that. And even writing a little book is hard. But to write something that moves heaven and earth–that takes courage. More and more, though, I’m reading my own writing and I can do better. I’m getting frustrated with the chained writing I’m doing. At some stage, I’m gonna have to throw off the chains, and churn out pages that rage. But it’s hard to write books no one can read. I did that for awhile. But I wonder if I could marry the explosion of my early books with the control and plotting of my later novels. In the end, Ayn Rand wouldn’t care about the art of the book, only about the sales. It’s about money, production, success, celebrating life by creating, innovating, selling, and driving forward. Kill the mediocrity inside you.

So, I am reeling from the event of Atlas Shrugged. You’ll get more. The bomb has gone off. It’s gonna take me any number of blog posts to pick up the pieces.