Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns

I came across this book after visiting Hearst Castle in San Simeon, CA. I remembered that Gail Wynand from The Fountainhead had been modeled after William Randolph Hearst and wanted to learn more. I did a search on Google and found a passage in Jennifer Burns' book describing the process Ayn Rand went through in writing The Fountainhead. I was intrigued to learn more about Rand's writing process so I bought the book which is a biography of Rand.

I wasn't interested in the details of her affair with Nathaniel Branden or her influence on the libertarians, but the details of her writing process were very interesting to me.  For example:

• She plotted out her novels before she started writing and then filled in the details with chapters which sometimes were only a sentence or two in her outline.
• She struggled with the resolution of The Fountainhead around which she could build a plot. It was only after working for free at an architect's office for six months that she learned that public housing was one of the biggest challenges for an architect. This gave her the idea for the ending and then she quickly plotted the rest of the book from this.
• The plotting of Atlas Shrugged went quickly as did the writing except for Galt's speech. She struggled between writing it as part of the story rather than as a philosophical essay in its own right.
• In Petrograd after the revolution, her father went on strike and refused to work at any meaningful job that used his intelligence. This impressed young Ayn and was inspiration for the plot of Atlas Shrugged.
• The Fountainhead had to be written and edited on a very rushed timeline. She had already missed the deadlines for a previous publisher who had cancelled her contract and she didn't want that to happen again. For me, The Fountainhead is much less compelling than either Atlas Shrugged or We the Living. Perhaps it is because it was the only novel she had to rush to complete.
• When she had trouble writing, she came up with strategies to break out of the writer's block (which she called the squirms). One technique was to take a walk on the path outside her home, collect stones, and then organize them by color and size.
• The reviews for The Fountainhead were mostly positive because she was someone new and had something fresh to say. The reviews for Atlas Shrugged were mostly negative even though the philosophy was the same. However, I believe the reviewer crowd finally figured out that she held them in contempt for being second-handers and they got their revenge with their reviews. However, it didn't work and Atlas Shrugged quickly became a best-seller.

Besides learning interesting things about Rand's writing process and her early life, the rest of the book was not very useful. Jennifer Burns does not understand Rand's philosophy and so her criticisms make her seem partisan to the libertarian faction. In addition, she gets several details wrong which should be corrected in future editions and on the Kindle version:

• She says Dagny Taggart's hair is blonde but it is brown.
• She said that The Passion of Ayn Rand film was made by HBO but it was Showtime.

At the end, she does make a useful observation that many of the books produced by The Ayn Rand Institute after Rand's death contain misleading changes to Rand's private writings, in particular her Journals. It is useful to know that these sources have been bowdlerized and are not necessarily representative of Rand's actual thoughts at the time.

Candide, by Voltaire

I read Candide over about two days. It was a very easy read considering it was written 255 years ago. I read this book because a respected leader I know often recommends this book as an example of optimism and perseverance in the face of adversity. After first hearing this, I looked it up on the Wikipedia page only to learn that it was written as a satire against the philosophical argument for optimism given by Leibniz.

Could it be true that this leader had completely misunderstood this novel as a satire and took it at face value? I read Candide to find out, and I'm still not sure. It is clearly a satire and Candide, the main character, is ridiculously naive. The book Candide is not at all subtle, with the characters being exposed to rape, hanging, torture, earthquakes, robberies, wars, etc., but Candide the character is still able to convince himself that it is all for the best and it is part of a grand plan.

Read with the proper context, Candide is an entertaining book and laugh-out-loud funny in several places. I also liked it that Voltaire inserted at the end some of his philosophy of life which is that being productive through work is one key to happiness.

The Innocent, by David Baldacci

I keep seeing David Baldacci books at the grocery store literature shelf so I thought I'd give him a try.  I don't like most of the regular authors I see there such as Clive Cussler, Janet Evanovich and James Patterson, but I do like some like Stephen King.

I started with The Innocent because it is supposed to be one of his best. While it is an easy read with likable characters, the plot structure was all messed up. The book is about a contract killer for the U.S. government who refuses to kill one of his assignments which makes his organization turn on him.  This is the first plot point but it occurs at about the 15% mark instead of the usual 20-25%. After this, there are no major revelations or other plot points until the 90% mark when the hero figures out what is going on. The last 10% is a mad rush to stop the bad guys and tie up all the loose ends. This last part is exhilarating, but it should have been spread out over the last 25% or even the last 50% of the book. The middle suffered from not enough progress and the end had too much.

This book just reinforces my belief that a four-part structure with set-up, response, attack and resolution are key for an entertaining story which keeps the reader interested for the entire novel.

Iron Lake, by William Kent Krueger

Iron Lake is a pretty good mystery story. Krueger has an easy style which is poetic at times. His main character acts heroically and has a fair amount of introspection through which we learn to identify with him.

There are two areas where Iron Lake could have been better. The first is that the plot became overly complicated at the end in order to tie up lots of loose threads pulled on throughout the novel. At least for me, the various unexplained actions in the middle of the book were confusing enough that I ignored most of them so that when they were tied up at the end I didn't care anymore.

The second issue is that the point-of-view switched to a few other characters for about 5% of the book.  It is disconcerting to have the point of view of the main character for the first quarter of the book, switch to another person's point of view for one single chapter, and then forge on with the main character for another ten chapters. The point-of-view should be constant with one character or should rotate more evenly through two or more characters.

Given that this was his first novel, these flaws are easily overlooked; I plan to read his more recent effort, Ordinary Grace.

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

Penn Jillette recommended The Mezzanine and I really enjoyed it, although it's not for everyone. When I heard him say that Moby Dick is his favorite book, I tried to read it but just couldn't get past the language barrier of reading a book written over 150 years ago. From the different idioms, unknown words, alternate meanings of common words, and references which were only understood in Melville's time, I struggled to understand what was happening in Moby Dick. Well, thanks to Margaret Guroff's edition at Power Moby Dick, one can read her annotated edition and actually understand the book. Her annotations are short but incredibly useful to get the story and the humor of Moby Dick.

And so I dove into Moby Dick and enjoyed the set-up of the novel, roughly the first quarter of the book, up through chapter 36 where Ahab announces his obsession to kill the white whale who bit off his leg. But then I only made it up to about chapter 50. I couldn't continue because the novel became too unfocused. Melville drags out endless details of the boat and the process of whaling. He also makes many metaphors about race and class, most of which I didn't get and didn't care to get because they are irrelevant in today's world. What really made me lose interest was that Melville was not trying to tell a good story. Rather, he used a simple plot which gave him an excuse to ramble on about religion, sex, money, revenge, madness, exploitation, etc.

Come to think of it, this is very similar to Penn Jillette's book Sock, which I did enjoy because his rants are relevant to today's world. Now I understand why Penn likes the book so much.