"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
--Kung Fu Monkey blog.
I found "Atlas Shrugged" to be a very great book, with fantastic overtones that were perhaps exagerrations of true things, but with an ennobling ethos at its core. LOTR covers quite similar territory on a mythic level: the power of the individual, the struggle against corrupt power, etc. I wonder what it would have been like for me if I had read "atlas" at 14 rather than 46...Still glad I read LOTR then, though!
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