gonna barf

[king_mob]

Bank Gets Atlas Shrugged Onto Reading List With Bribe

The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged'’ would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C

Comments

[boundfate]

Hmm. I don't mind Atlas shrugged being required reading (love it, in fact), but I really hate the idea that money buys lesson plans.

[king_mob]

See, I hate both aspects! It's a, what, bifecta? Is that the word?

[midnighter]

Actually, I wholeheartedly agree with the disgust on this. If you have to basically buy readers for something, what the hell makes you think you're somehow going to get even the most basically receptive, never mind 'potentially converted' readership out of this? If I had to agree to pay anybody so much as twenty bucks to read anything I've written, I'd be a total moron to expect them to do anything other than enjoy pocketing my cash, and maybe not even reading the damned thing after all.

Atlas Shrugged isn't even her best novel. It's her best espousal of concept, perhaps...but it's a bore to read all the way through. The Fountainhead is a far more enjoyable and to-the-point read, and more of a real narrative. Atlas beats you over the head by the time you get to that FIFTY-PAGE-LONG SPEECH by John Galt.

I even like John Galt as a mystery protagonist, and I can't read Atlas again. I've tried. I don't have the idiot openness and energy I had at seventeen when I first had it handed to me. And nobody was paying me a million bucks