• • Book case 
,
Atlas Shrugged  |Personal life  | The classic image of the novelist is one in which we see her smiling with satisfaction as the last page is placed on the pile and the dedication is written - "To Frank O'Connor and Nathaniel Branden" - the husband and lover of Ayn Rand, to whom she dedicated her mammoth novel, Atlas Shrugged.      View blog reactions

• • Reviews: Biographies, posthumous fiction and new novels by Pamuk and Kingsolver 
,
Atlas Shrugged  | Kicking off the week is a new biography of everyone’s favourite arch-conservative Ayn Rand by Anne C. Heller. When I worked in a secondhand bookshop Rand was the favourite of pretty young ladies whose mothers had raved about how Atlas Shrugged had changed their lives back in the day. Problem is as Adam Kirsch points out in his review of the biography in The New York Times: “This is at once the failure and the making of Rand’s fiction. The plotting and characterization in her books may be vulgar and unbelievable, just as one would expect from the middling Holly­wood screenwriter she once was; but her message, while not necessarily more sophisticated, is magnified by the power of its absolute sincerity.” You see, she writes terribly but believed bitterly in her hardcore iron-lady message to the folks that didn’t do flower power.      View blog reactions

• Bookshelf show-offs 
,
We all have motivations for buying books we never read. We’ve been told we should read Ayn Rand; intelligent people seem to be big on Ulysses; middle-aged men who want you to believe they were once devil-may-care types tell you that Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man changed their lives.      View blog reactions

• Adventures in Blunderland 
,
The Fountainhead  | Fikile Mbalula and the ANC Youth League might do well to have a study-group reading of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. They could supplement this with a public reading of TS Arthur’s 19th-century Temperance-movement classic, Ten Nights in a Bar Room and What I Saw There, which they could then pass on to Helen Zille — for her to read in the time not taken up by her intensive studies of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.      View blog reactions