About There

As I ease up on watching my VHS tapes, I gear up on watching movies via other media. That still has left me with enough time to mount a new push towards finishing "Atlas Shrugged". I have really hit the stretch run, at long last. I suspect it will be no more than a day or two so long as I keep my resolve. I am quite eager to move on to something new. In fact, I have ordered up a trio of books that I expect to be light and enjoyable, so I do hope I finish the task at hand as promptly as I expect.

The real hump that I have gotten over is the infamously long speech given by one of the book's central characters near the end. There's no need to get really in depth on the content or the context of the speech in order to impress on you the severity of it. It takes most of a 70-some page chapter, and there are no breaks. There are absolutely no breaks in this speech. There is not one moment where the person stops speaking for any reason. It's all a straight monologue.

Let me tell you, it's nearly unbearable. It's as if a pamphlet for moral objectivism fell into the galleys (if I haven't really muddled a lot of publishing terminology) and they just printed it that way. The speech seldom betrays the speaker's identity or any of the story, characters and relationships that you might want to grab onto. It's just page after page after page of pure philosophy from the mind of Ayn Rand, and it's somehow drier than if it was somebody's college thesis.

Apart from being near the end, though, having survived this trial has me more enthusiastic than ever. I'll be nearly orgasmic over the prospect of reading an exchange between multiple characters, some kind of action or anything connected to the progression of the plot. You take those things for granted when you read three hundred page novels that are no longer than they need to be. This one sure didn't need any more than that, but I bear no bitterness. I took on this challenge and I'm triumphing.