I will admit to skimming.

Nothing wrong with the book but I just read it for the first time. This is not one I read as a kid.

Having read so much dystopian, so many books like this, I did have a tough time getting into Anthem.

I did not feel like I knew the characters and I felt distant from the book in general. It was sort of an impersonal read and did not linger with me when I was done. At all.

When I start to do the skim thing so early in a book, I kind of know it's not for me. To date, this remains the only book of hers that I have read.

The word that comes to mind is "bland." I did not feel too much when reading this and so I couldn't really get all that involved.


So..did not hate it..did not love it. It was a very unmemorable reading experience though I realize I maybe in the minority on this.

یکی از کتاب های خوبی بود که این چند وقت خوندم. با دید خیلی متفاوت نسبت به بقیه از این جهت که الان که همه جا صحبت از کمک به هم نوع و دیدن بقیه و برابری و کلمه (ما) میشه این کتاب برای توجه به (من) نوشته شده. داستان آینده ی وحشتناک بشر رو روایت میکنه که بعد از اتفاقاتی همه چیز نابود شده و کسی هم حق صحبت راجع به گذشته نداره. همه با هم زندگی میکنند و همه تصمیمات توسط شوراها گرفته میشه تا اینکه شخصی متفاوت فکر و عمل میکنه و بقیه ی داستان

Ayn Rand is a point of fascination for me. On a completely selfish level her philosophy, Objectivism, makes perfect sense. But then, in the words of another great philosopher George Carlin, I do this stupid thing called 'thinking'. I start thinking about how, like or hate it (and I hate it), humanity either stands together or falls apart (oh look, something resembling a pun). And the ones, the supposed 'true' individuals are either all facade (surrounded by coruscating hypocrisies such as supportive family and friends, good jobs, no real actual problems to individuate themselves against) or, the other 'true' individuals who care nothing for nobody and anything save themselves....what's that word for those people? Sociopaths.

Look, Rand. Morality's a bugaboo, I hear you, really I do. And (organized) religion and factory style spiritualism (pumped out by a funny hat leader of your preference or obligation) have made the curse of it worse. But without connectivity, without interactivity, without our fellow men (and women, if I can reference Batman Returns in a very overly circuitous way) our only alternative is either suicide (hey, Camus), sociopathy (too many to list) or such an intense solitude (ala Gogol and his straw eating self) that you render yourself God unto yourself (narcissism supreme) or simply hide yourself into complete irrelevance. I enjoy Objectivism (as shown in Anthem and in my continued laborious scaling of The Fountainhead) but merely as an extended thought experiment. Nothing more.

And don't even ask me about the Libertarians.

Possibly the most pretentious writing I've ever experienced.

A truly interesting read, Ayn Rand's book holds a captivating narrative. But as I watched the character swerve from the absolute collective to an absolute, egocentric conclusion, I ended up pitying the hero and his hapless companion for stumbling upon the wrong conclusion upon which they would base the rest of their existence. And what happened to "The Golden One" (his much less assertive true love)? All I could see was that for all the hero's self realization, his mate was merely a follower and a worshiper of his fantastic, glowing sacred "I". I am sorry to say Ayn Rand started with a great idea of individualism and ended in the trainwreck of selfish isolation.

The baby version of Ayn Rand philosophy, heavy handed, unimaginative, and unfortunately assigned to my son for high school reading. I struggle with Ayn Rand because I agree with some of her points and I vehemently disagree with others. The point is that bad things happen when the left or the right gain too much control because we always seem to end up in the same place with the government oppressing individual freedoms. It is really stunning to think of the millions of copies of this book that have been sold. I would say skip it, but if your child is assigned to read it please do read it. I'm a firm believer that parents should read any book their child is assigned in school to read.

I don't know what the point of this book is. It desperately wants to be 1984, but in no way shape or form comes close. It's absolutely mindless and I gained nothing from it at all. The resolution is so absurd, and the premises is equally absurd. The last words:

n  And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory.

The sacred word:
EGOn

What does this mean? Honestly. The take away is that we should be fundamentally selfish in order to avoid.... forming into.... a mindless hivemind? Why is that the only conclusion drawn from charity and selflessness? It's never explained, it's never formed into reality. It's just a statement.

It's not worth reading but it's short enough that I guess I am glad to know what I was "missing". Danny Salinger's review says it better than me: "This book might have been revolutionary for its time, but we've moved on as a culture. We've gotten over the novelty of selfishness being a virtue and social control being a bad thing, and we've managed to produce far more intelligent treatments of the subject."

I was probably 13 when my aunt gave this to me to read during my summer break. I think I was having existential angst and wondering why I was the oddball and never the normal one and why other kids had it so easy/were so boring.

I'm assuming my aunt gave this to me in order to show me that individuality is a blessing, that if we were all the same, we'd be little better than robots, that our lives would be pointless. And I understood that message but that's not what made its impact on my tender little brain.
Instead, this scared me like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" scared me, like The Handmaid's Tale would scare me about five years later.

I didn't internalize the pep talk of "See? You should be proud of having a sense of self, of being your own person" but, instead, grew terrified of other people trying to control me, trying to make me do what they wanted me to do, trying to make me behave in a fashion best suited to their needs, not mine.
Which is also a fairly standard reaction to this book, I am sure. However, maybe I shouldn't have read this at 13. I probably would have been better prepared to deal with my freak-out and subsequent paranoia, which would have led to a much better teenage rebellion (mine involved sitting alone in my room, blasting Enya on the record player - my step-dad still hates Enya to this day. Yes, Enya - and reading fantasy novels. My mom practically begged me to sneak out of the house, drink, smoke, get stoned and have sex because she was not comfortable with my slinking, sullen, withdrawn, fantasy-addled, smart-mouthed, overly-sensible self) had I read this in high school. Yeah, 13-year-old me figured the best way to keep from being taken over by anyone was to hide, hide, hide. So I hid, hid, hid. And this did me no favors whatsoever and I didn't actually learn to grow up until I was well into my 20's.

On the plus side, though, I don't have a criminal record, I do have a good education, I'm the least worried about fitting in and being normal, and I'm probably the happiest member in my family so...maybe being scared of assimilation at age 13 actually worked for me and I just didn't realize it until right this very minute.

My desire to choose such, hm..., strange books is frightening me. But let's leave my daemons aside. Reading "Anthem" alerted me with an unusual narrative: "we", "our", "they" were used to describe both the narrator and others. There were no such words as "Me", "Myself" or "I" in the biggest part of the book, as in the world of the main character they are forbidden to speak. It was intriguing and of course it left some confusion in me, because at first it was hard to sort singulars and plurals. The people in this book aren't individuals and individuality is doomed. Even their names are strange: Equality 7-2521 or Liberty 5-3000. The strongest part of this book (and the most attractive) is the struggle to find identity, individuality and freedom. Though with some limitations.

As I like when strong female and tough male characters blend, this book was definitely not my type, because any such allusion was removed. The society and the main activists are distinctly masculine, with no star identity for women in the book. The only significant woman gets her short praise but She quickly turns into an insignificant support. She is all love and devotion and He is more interested in reading. She even can't get her own name, when at last He discovers freedom and his "I", He does that for her. Even after freeing himself He doesn't want to free all the people in the damned city, just some of his friends, who are male of course. Oh, and what happens when She is expecting a child. The child will definitely be a boy. Eh, and who is She to judge the wonderful masculine world in this book, She is just a helpless woman near the feet of the WONDERFUL man, who is so kind to lead her. Jesus Christ with the holy Mary!




I just can't believe that this book was written by a woman.

I don't have a reasonable explanation for why I enjoy Ayn Rand's writing since, as a human being, I find her and her values (which include but were not limited to homophobia, xenophobia, classism, sexual discrimination/harassment, and being mean to poor people) kind of repulsive.

My first experiences with her writing are also weirdly synonymous with my first experiences on the internet since my very first profile (on AOL thank you very much) included a quote from Atlas Shrugged. I very clearly recall getting simply loads of IM's (instant messages for the babies reading this) from people with handles like "GaltValley" and "HowardRoark" who literally invited me to Rand Retreats, whatever the great goddamn those are.

So she's got sort of a special place in my heart I guess.

I think I like the grandiosity of her writing. Like if you look up the definition of "Ego" in the dictionary there she'll be. I don't want to say I admire her, but there is something almost impressive about someone who is that completely self absorbed. Not impressive good like a Van Gogh painting, more like impressive the way World War I is impressive in the sheer number of horses it managed to kill.

Also I read most of her stuff when I was teenager. So forgive me for thinking things like Howard and Dominique's relationship in "The Fountainhead" was epically romantic and not disgusting since, well, he's a rapist. Teenagers like big, grandiose, dramatic shit. Her specialty.

Given her propensity for letting characters commit fraud, sabotage, murder, rape and basically end civilization in the name of the all mighty EGO in her larger works I don't think its unfair to call Anthem "light reading" by comparison. Its certainly shorter and it lacks a lot of the menace of her other, longer works.

The horrors of things like socialized health care, welfare, and compassion for humanity have already destroyed civilization when the book starts. Everyone has names like our hero Equality 7-2521 and refers to themselves as "we" and "us" because THERE IS NO INDIVIDUAL!!!!!!!!! EVERYTHING IS FOR THE BETTERMENT OF HUMANITY AS A WHOLE!!!!!! THERE IS NO "I" THERE IS ONLY "WE!!!!!!!"

Equality 7-2521's circumstances are a little different though. See he has...desires. He wants to learn things, study things, build things. Not for the betterment of his fellow men but just cause he wants to.

This is, naturally, horrible because THERE IS NO INDIVIDUAL!!!!! So Equality 7-2521 heads for the hills with a conveniently gorgeous babe named Liberty 5-3000 and they live in the woods for awhile and then they find a house from "the unmentionable times" when people said "I" and read books and other things that ran contrary to the whole THERE IS NO INDIVIDUAL agenda.

Blah, blah, blah they read books, they discover "I" yadda, yadda, yadda.

Clearly this is Rand's own personal 1984 but since it never gets further than hysterical yelling of EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE OR NOTHING FOR ANYONE!!!!! it doesn't really succeed on any level. Our heroes are just so perfectly perfect and gorgeous and geniuses and weirdly Aryan and the terrible, horrible, very bad "Council" who run the world are little, mean, stupid and vaguely "other" which is to say not white, blond and blue eyed that it all just feels icky and racist and like some kind of nightmarish fairy tale that you would never, ever read to a child.

I know a little about where Rand came from (communist Russia) so I do sort of get it. She literally lived through the sort of stuff she rails against in her stories. My problem with her philosophy is that its honestly just as extremist as the agenda of the people like Lenin. She'd rather the world burn than have anyone offer a hand up to someone struggling. It just makes me kind of ill.

So after all that it might surprise you to learn that I kind of enjoy this book. Just like I can't help but enjoy "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" even if I ALWAYS skip the twenty pages of sermonizing the heroes of both those books do at the end. She writes strong characters, characters you can't really help but admire. There's fire in her writing that I frankly defy you not to feel. I want Equality 7-2521 to win out over "The Council" even if I objectively know the whole thing is nonsense. She makes me care about what happens to her characters. She make me glad when things work out for them.

She's just also totally full of shit.

“Your mouth is cut of granite, but our brothers are soft and humble. Your head is high, but our brothers cringe. You walk, but our brothers crawl. We wish to be damned with you, rather than blessed with all our brothers.”
- Ayn Rand
Anthem

“Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.”
- John Milton
Paradise Lost

I know a lot of my friends will disagree (possibly quite vehemently), but I find Ayn Rand’s philosophy fascinating. I do not agree with her, nor do I completely disagree with all of her ideas. I find her interesting in the same way that I enjoy epistemology. I like thinking about her ideas, while at the same time feeling that the argument, while having merit, does not even come close to providing any of the answers she thinks it does.

It’s hard to examine one of Rand’s books from any point other than that of philosophy (whether you agree with her or not) as it is prominently on her mind throughout. That said, looking at this one from just a literary standpoint, I confess I was impressed with the stylistic touches (the narrator being so ingrained into a collective society as to always use “we” instead of “I”) and how she builds up the idea of a collapsed society. It’s actually a wonderful dystopian set up, made even more impressive by having been written in the 1930s, before many of the big standouts of dystopian literature. I would have almost said it was a must read for fans of that sub-genre (and indeed it may still be depending on your outlook). It was all going so well until the last two chapters which pretty much ruined what was potentially a 5 star read.

Let’s break out the spoiler tag for a good portion of the review, as I can't really discuss my issues without getting into major spoiler territory.

So yes, Rand's philosophy was woven throughout the book, but where it was woven into the text in a thoughtful way before hand, making the reader (or at least this reader) think about her ideas in depth and consider merits and faults, the final is too blunt. In fact, she pretty much has her character just give a manifesto and outline for the future (shades of what things to come in Atlas Shrugged). Let me give a few choice quotes and address my issues here (other than that a carefully told story ended with a blunt anvil drop of an ending).

Set up here: our narrator finds a house. Decides to essentially turn it into a fortress keeping all but the likeminded individuals out. His love interest is by his side, and expecting a child.

"I do not grant my love without reason, nor to any chance passer-by who may wish to claim it. I honor men with my love. But honor is a thing to be earned."

This is very humorous given that he met his love interest by just passing by her on multiple occasions, having a borderline clichéd love at first sight moment, and tying to make sure he always walked the same path every day just to see her. Oh, and while we’re at it, she is mostly devoid of a personality other than blind devotion and worship of this character. Who has this love been “earned,” just through blind faith in you? Is this how you purpose to find your “likeminded” thinkers, by gaining nothing but the blind followers you purpose to hate? Another collective “we,” just a “we” that follows you?

“Now I look ahead. My future is clear before me. The Saint of the pyre had seen the future when he chose me as his heir” (An explanation here is in order: when he was a kid he saw a man burned to death for breaking the rules of the “collective we.” The man didn’t scream as he was burned to death, and at one point our narrator thought he looked at him). “as the heir of all the saints and all the martyrs who came before him and who died for the same cause, for the same word, no matter what name they gave to their cause and their truth.”

The delusions of grandeur in this statement are stunning. He chose you did he? How? By glancing at you while he was burning to death? Truly you must be the chosen one! I know this was supposed to be an inspirational speech and come off as “heroic,” but it comes off as someone with an extreme ego inflating it and creating something of a prophesy about himself. Hell, this comes off as the rise of a god damn supervillian.

Here’s the thing, and I can’t stress this enough; Rand created a shocking and terrible view of the future. The world the narrator presents to us IS terrible. In taking the idea of a group and placing it above all else, she presents a cold world that seems to care, but hurts itself. It’s cleverly done and horrific… but the alternative she presents is just as extreme in the opposite direction. There is no middle ground. You are either with her or against her, and frankly both possibilities are horrifying to me.

So, is the book worth a read? Damn it, yes it is. It is a classic work of dystopian fiction and if you like the genre, you'll be in for a fascinating early example that does post apocalyptic better than most books that came out after the atomic bomb was actually dropped. Just don't expect a proper story with a beginning, middle and end. Be prepared for Rand's philosophy and be prepared for a speech that seems to close the book with "this is my opinion and I'll end the book just to hear no argument!"

3/5 stars.

Anthem is one of Ayn Rand's earlier works, where she starts shaping the core ideas of her philosophy called Objectivism. While she touches on these concepts, they aren't fully fleshed out, and some extra research is needed to understand them. The story is set in a Neo-Luddite dystopia where people are stripped of their individuality and institutions control every aspect of life. The main character, Equality 7-2521, commits multiple transgressions challenging the herd mentality that dominates society.

The four pillars of Objectivism--metaphysics (objective reality), epistemology (reason), ethics (self-interest), and politics (laissez-faire capitalism)--are present in Equality 7-2521's journey. His secret experiments and discoveries demonstrate a commitment to objective reality and independent thought. He values reason and evidence over blind acceptance of dogma. His focus on his own needs and well-being represents a choice of self-interest over the collective's well-being. Private property and laissez-faire capitalism are hinted at in the ending and not thoroughly explored.

Equality 7-2521's character arc, while significant, feels underdeveloped, barely touching on the practical and emotional challenges he might face. Rand's writing is unpolished--it's unengaging, dry, and awkwardly phrased, and I struggled to finish reading. The dialogues are forced, robotic, and unrealistic, and the events and descriptions are simplistic, leaving little room for interpretation. The book does criticize collectivism and the lack of individuality or competition for ideas, albeit in a very superficial manner without diving into the complexities of such a system.