Well, what a bl***y waste of time. Whatever. In spite of the little voice that said «perhaps not? You know, really?» in the back of my head I thought I’d give the Snicket books a try. I have sort of been planning to since they first appeared, actually, just never quite managed to persuade myself that the tiny snippets laughingly called «books» were worth the pricetag. My better judgement must have been asleep when I finally forked out for A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning. It’s not so much not good as simply completely uninteresting. It’s a bit like Harry Potter at the Dursleys’. Except there’s no magic and that’s all there is. I mean, what makes the Harry at the Dursleys’ episodes interesting is the contrast with the rest of the book – here there is no «the rest». That’s all there is. Perhaps «the rest» turns up in later books? I have no idea. And I won’t be finding out, either, The Bad Beginning did not tempt me to continue reading.

And another thing, the narrator keeps explaining «difficult» words throughout. Not necessarily a bad thing, a few of the explanations brought me the closest to smiling that the text managed, but the «difficulty» wasn’t very consistent. At one point he explains «faked» with «feigned» – now it may be that native english speakers are more familiar with the latter than the former, but I doubt it – «fake» is, after all, a reasonably basic term. «Feign» seemd to me to be the term needing explanation (if any of them need it). At other points he fails to explain terms that I would have thought were beyond what you’d expect the core audience to understand readily. But it may just be me. English isn’t my native language, after all, and I expect words that seem obscure to me may be obvious to your average ten-year-old from Swindon.

En bok jeg plukket opp på bibliotekets utsalgsvogn fordi tittelen inneholdt ordet «bokorm». Jeg vet. Jeg er en enkel sjel. Av bokormens liv er en ganske fornøyelig samling barndomsminner fra et noe uvanlig hjem. Det var mindre snakk om bøker enn jeg hadde ventet, derfor var jeg vel en smule skuffet, men alt i alt en ganske behagelig leseropplevelse.

So, I finally finished Atlas Shrugged. Phew.

What to say? Well, it’s an interesting read for many reasons, though waaaaaaaay too long. For instance, I basically skipped the climactic speech towards the very end – 20 or so pages at least – since if you’ve actually read and understood the previous 950 pages, the speech is pretty much redundant. As are the majority of the longer soliloquies earlier in the book. Someone ought to give Rand a lesson in «show, don’t tell». Are all «philosophers» this wordy? Actually, I know the answer to that, and it’s «Many, but no, not all».

While the plot of the book is soundly structured and can make for an engaging read if you ignore all the waffle (and there is a lot of waffle) it’s hard to accept Rand’s philosophy, even at face value the «every man (or woman) for himself» is off-putting.

One thing I will say, which is not something I’ve seen mentioned in other critiques of the book, is that a major stumbling block for Rand’s attempt at converting me is the feeling one gets that though she seems to find few enough men worthy of any attention, she finds even fewer women. Dagny Taggart is the only woman who really makes herself felt in the novel. With the exception of two peripheral characters (one of which comes to grief before she has a chance of proper «redemption»), all the other «worthy» persons are men. And naturally quite a few of these «worthy» men are in love with Dagny. Fair enough, but as the writer is a woman herself and the novel an acknowledged explanation of a personal philosophy one can’t help feel that Dagny is meant to be at least partly a self-portrait and the hopeless devotion of all these super-humans leaves one with an unpleasant taste in one’s mouth. It’s all a bit too self-applauding.