Fountainhead. Anthem made the point and didn't waste trees.
Fountainhead was disturbing (not in a good way). I was looking through the list to see if anybody else had named it before I made my post as such. Anthem was just *****. I read in in probably middle school, and by the time I had read it I was already familliar with dystopian fiction to the point to see how bad it was. The way I describe Rand's writing, it reads like she is summarising a book that somebody else has written.
A lot of people cite Zamyatin's We as an alternative to Anthem. For the first half I really did not like it. I could not relate to or sympathise with or see as remotely real any of the characters. I mean, the book, narrated by the main character, seemed far too interested in comparing contemporary culture to that of a culture from a millenium ago. How many of us sit around constantly thinking about how society today compares to society around 1000 CE?
It's possible to look at this and say, well, maybe the main character has a private obsession with society in that age and that is the root of his eventual wanting to break away from the society he is in. It's possible.
However, I took a similar reading to Fountainhead. Howard Roark is glorifying his own architectural genius and complaining about being kicked out of school for being too original. His character seemed pretty unstable. Consequently, I took the approach of looking beyond his character and supposing that the character was somebody that preferred to think of himself as being rejected by the school and most likely locking on to some particular interaction where his professor was teaching about the influence of roman architecture (and possibly he started arguing with the professor). In fact, I think that it was pretty safe to suspect that his professors desperatly wanted their students to think originally and not repeat back the same tired ideas that have come to them from years of student prior (as this is the case for most professors in classes that require any open creative work by the students (including history professors, political science, etc)) and in fact Roark was a student who had a few good ideas but didn't actually do his assignments and spent all of classes vocalising some mantra about his ideas (and not taking advantage of class as a way to learn and to help him develop these ideas). So, he seems pretty much like a loser who would hang out at Denny's and complain about how he is too brilliant for the world.
I think that anybody who has read the Fountainhead as a literary work can see how I could get this idea about the main character.
So later he's practicing architecture without a license, raping some board rich woman who idles away constructing her own fantasies of grandure, and when Toohey comes along (who I had been desperatly waiting for as a possible sane character) he's a bloody megalomaniacal straw man.
About the time Roark blew up the housing project then I had to stop reading. The book was just too much of a mind ****.
But getting back to muy original train of thought, although We didn't begin well, it had a relatively strong finish with a touch of biblical allegory common to Russian literature.
