Target: 100 books
Current: 23 books
Where's book #22 you ask? It was The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. I thought it was okay, and I'll write about it soon. It's just that I wanted to get this one out while I could.
I read The Fountainhead about three months ago, and I think I'm finally ready to talk about it.
#23
The Fountainhead
- Ayn Rand
Loved it, Idealistic, Intense
I feel as if anything I might write about this book will sound trite and pretentious. There really isn't much to say other than that it moved me like not much else has. I don't care for architecture, or for books about architects. I don't usually care for authors
whose views are borderline offensive and polarizing. I'm not sure what Ayn Rand was hoping I'd get out of The Fountainhead, but that's not really up to her, is it? No. Her part ended when she penned the words, and now I've made the book mine. It is quite possible that I have, for lack of a better phrase, fallen in love; with Howard Roark, Dominique Francon, Gail Wynand, Peter Keating, and Ellsworth Toohey - people whose lives have surely permeated what's left of mine.
If the book were a piece of music, then these were some of the beautiful crescendos I perceived:
"He talked about his own work. She listened, as if she were an emigrant hearing her homeland's language for a brief while."
"Can one feel gratitude for gratitude? It's a little hard to express, but that's what I feel, Dominique."
"Don't help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don't work for my happiness, my brothers--show me yours--show me that it is possible--show me your achievement--and the knowledge will give me courage for mine."
"This is pity, he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue."
"He thought that he had believed it was a simple sequence, the past and the present, and if there was loss in the past one was compensated by pain in the present, and pain gave it a form of immortality--but he had not known that one could destroy like this, kill retroactively--so that to her it had never existed."
"You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated..."
"Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism?"
"Build it as a monument to that spirit which is yours...and could have been mine."
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