Ayn Rand.

Since I finished another essay I thought I could afford another blog entry. Because this is important.

As I suppose most of you already know, Atlas Shrugged is being turned into a movie. A movie that actually looks really good and promising - which is hard to imagine considering the magnitude of the book. Luckily for me, it was ages ago since I read Atlas Shrugged, so any inaccuracies won't be that painful. To be honest, I didn't actually finish it. Rand's books are notoriously difficult to read because they exhaust you emotionally, and this book is over a thousand pages long so there's room for lots of exhausting material. Rand does not like her characters to be happy. What I read (800-900 pages or so), however, was brilliant. Naturally, I'm going to finish it one day. The movie that is out now is, after all, only part one, so I figure I have some time.

It can be difficult to adapt to the actors that have been chosen to play characters from a book, since you already know what those people looked like in your head. I must say, however, that the actors appear to be extremely well-chosen for Atlas Shrugged. Dagny may be a little bit too beautiful and soft around the edges - I can't really remember - but Rearden is perfect.



I think I discovered Ayn Rand when I was 15 or 16. Perhaps 17. I can't remember who mentioned the book to me or how I ended up reading it, but I borrowed it at the library and I remembered it was huge and had a somewhat weird cover. This was in high school, when we didn't have all that much to do and I could spend a lot of time reading. And I remember falling ill. I think it was a throat infection of some sort, I'm quite prone to those. Since I come from a family that waits until we start to decompose before we go to the doctor, I was in a rather miserable state and could absolutely not sleep because of the pain, so I read The Fountainhead until 5 a.m. or something like that and forgot about how miserable I was. Ever since then I have loved Rand's books, and it's only a shame that there are so few of them.

In Russia, I stumbled upon We The Living in Dom Knigi on Nevskij Prospekt. I think I just cast a glance towards a pile of books and noticed that the name of the author was very weird-looking in Russian. Then I realized that name was Ayn Rand, who is actually Russian to begin with. And how appropriate to read her first book, set in St. Petersburg, in Russian! I very much enjoyed the book, even if it does not reach the same standard as the Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged.

In other news, HBO is turning A Game of Thrones into a TV series. This is also very, very interesting.