I picked up a copy of Atlas Shrugged at a book swap for 25 cents.  The paperback was old enough that the price on the cover said 95 cents.  I thought I had heard of the title before and there was a faint Spideysense tingling that it was important.  I started to read it an knew immediately that it was something I would remember forever.

My dad is what you would call a voracious reader.  He is reading the library in Parry Sound (insert your own, “all two books?” joke here).  When he spotted my copy of Atlas Shrugged on my nightstand on a recent visit he said, “you reading that?  Let me know how it was because I couldn’t get through it.”  That basically steeled (no pun intended) my resolve to finish the tome when I was struggling with a particularly wordy chapter.

I’m proud to say that I have finished the book and can now provide an informed summary.  But that would be irresponsible.  Reading a summary of Atlas Shrugged won’t do the message justice.  What I do want to share with you is how it has changed the way I feel and act almost daily.  I don’t know if it would have the same effect on everyone or if I was in the perfect target audience but it truly did change my way of thinking.

I used to be the kind of guy who would say about a McDonald’s or Petro Canada law suit, “why don’t they just pay up?  They can afford it.”  Ayn Rand takes that kind of attitude and extends it to its logical, if upsetting, conclusion.  She gives strength to unions and charities and basically brings a form of People’s State/dictatorship/Communism to the entire world.  After reading the book I can safely say that I will never look at unions or taxing the rich the same way again.

There’s a current situation in Ontario (the Canadian province I live in) where General Motors is closing a truck production plant and the union of workers is fighting to keep it open.  What’s amazing is how disturbing the situation is after you’ve read this book.  You just want to tell the union leaders to give their collective heads a shake.  How is forcing the company to keep the plant open going to help its employees?  The company will be weakened, demand for trucks will not be increased, workers will be stuck in jobs that will have less meaning and they’ll have less incentive to improve themselves to find new jobs (which they’ll eventually need anyway).

Please don’t misconstrue my interpretation as having no feeling for the workers - once you’ve read the book you’ll understand that it’s not about not caring - it’s quite the opposite.  But forcing the big companies to take losses only for the temporary benefit of its employees is a recipe for disaster.

While I think that this book should be required reading for any high school-aged student, I do think that they could do with an abridged version.  1084 pages is too much.  I got the point after about 400 and only continued for the satisfaction of having said that I had completed it.  The fact that there’s a movie adaptation coming out soon had something to do with it too.  I always want to read the book first before I’m stuck with the vision of Angelina Jolie in a role that I think she’s both physically and ethically completely wrong for.

– spoilers follow –

The one aspect of the book that I thought was misrepresented was love.  Yeah, a good phone company commercial might choke me up and that damn Cinderella song by Steven Curtis Chapman makes me cry when I think about it, but I still choose Bruce Willis over Hugh Grant, if you catch my drift.  I just thought that poor Eddie Willers, who loved Dagny Taggart (as three other men in the book appear to at one point or another), got a really rough deal.  His only crime in the book seems to be his unflinching devotion to Dagny.  While he appears to be living for her approval, which is against the moral of the story, he is smart and he does try to make decisions and improve things.  He should have at least warranted a happy ending instead of being stranded in the middle of nowhere with a busted locomotive.  Maybe in the movie he’ll get the train running again - Hollywood, you know.