I haven't read her stuff either. The length of her novels are enough to put me off.

I read "Anthem". As short as it was, it bored me to death. Avoid it, if you want dystopia, choose Zamjatin, Huxley or Orwell.

There are reasonable Rand fans, but there's a certain rabid brand of them that's very common on the Internet, and once you're familiar with them you can spot them a mile away just by how they say certain things.

They've been known to derail more than one conversation thread and to be generally insufferable boors.

I've been compelled by my son to read Rand, following his dip in with the high school subculture of Rand the liberator. He agrees that other than We the Living (which has taken me more than a month to get through), the other books display only flat characters in black and white hats, and aren't worth a read. Synopsis or Cliff's Notes, maybe, in the case of Atlas Shrugged, particularly for Libertarians. Or is that redundant?

Heh. Randroids.

I've read (several times) and love the novel The Fountainhead (loathe the film, though...), but every attempt (and there have been several) I've made at getting past the first couple dozen pages of Atlas Shrugged has been unsuccessful (and I *have* read both Joyce's Ulysses and the King James Bible straight through -- well, okay, the former with Cliffs Notes handy and skipping all the 'begats' in the latter...)

Okay, I'll set myself up for a thrashing from everyone on this blog by admitting I rather enjoy Ms. Rand's novels and find at least some of her philosophical points interesting. And in life she was a colorful, loony person, interesting to watch from a distance. But I don't have much use for people who get tedious and monomaniacal about objectivism or any other ideological point. I've seen threads on intelligent design that, for sheer grim tedium, make Atlas Shrugged look like a rollicking beach read.

Also, FWIW, my sometime GF grew up in the Soviet Union, and We the Living is one of her all-time favorite novels.