My nominations for other books worse than Rands:
The Wealth of Nations - Adam smith
Das Kapital - Karl Marx
They were close to being as dull as Atlas Shrugged.
I can come up with dozens of books that are not only "as dull as Atlas Shrugged," but even duller. I've got one on my shelf right now -- it's called
The Differential Cryptanalysis of the Data Encryption System (by Biham and Shamir). And Kohler's
Bibliography of Quantitative Linguistics is duller yet, and don't get me started on the
Oxford English Dictionary.
A key point that seems to be being missed is that
Atlas Shrugged is a novel, while
Wealth,
Kapital, and
Differential Cryptanalysis are at least ostensibly non-fiction books written to analyze the real world from a factual perspective. One of the key problems with
Atlas is that the characters and situations are totally unrealistic making it less a novel than a fable or a fairy tale, while at the same time it lacks all the interesting elements that make fables worth reading. Furthermore, the utter unrealism acts to undercut any moral lesson to be learned from the book, since it's difficult for a non-indoctrinated person to believe that there is any causal connection between the states of mind she portrays so badly and the later effects.
Furthermore, her characters do a great job of
not exemplifying the virtues she preaches -- as Skeptic pointed out, her heroic characters are not Objectivists, but Platonists or Kantians.
As a novel,
Atlas fails because it sucks. As a sociological or political analysis,
Atlas fails because it has no discernable factual basis. And as a work of philosophy,
Atlas fails because it's doesn't present and argue with any competence towards any sensible position.
On the other hand, it does a great job of keeping the rest of the books on my shelf from falling over. But there are much easier ways to produce bookends.
