Anthem

Loved the latin "ego" meaning "I" ending. Great message, but a little long with all the description in the end chapters. I had to read this in a night for school and it was much better than I thought. Great overnight read, took me 3 hours. Happy reading!

As irrelevant as it is unrealistic, Ayn Rand has given us an absolutely impossible dystopian future in which the world has regressed to a new Dark Age characterized by blind, total adherence to an absurdly extreme form of collectivism—one that even primitive nomads wouldn't fall victim to. Anyone with an ounce of common sense should be able to see that the narrative, like most of Rand's fiction, is predicated on the existence of a human species that invariably falls into two categories: Ayn Rand's version of an übermensch, and thoughtless, irrational collectivist drones who are helpless to defend themselves against the evils of any school of thought involving a non-Randian social contract. Anyone looking for philosophical dystopian fiction would be better off reading something like 1984. Anthem, on the other hand, is recommended only as a cup of Kool-Aid for existing adherents to Rand's hack philosophy, Objectivism (which boils down to a series of non-sequiturs hastily built on unjustified axioms, in essence designed to take common sense points of rational self-interest into absurd, self-defeating extremes), for those who compulsively avoid depth in their literature or contemplation, or for any suitably depressed cutter suffering a shortage of blades.

In the days where we are constantly bombarded with “the we is more important than the me” this is a great reminder of the little freedoms that are slowly stolen in the name of the Greater Good.