• • Daddy, buy me a pony 
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Atlas Shrugged  | If you’re still too self-conscious to admit to actually reading - never mind liking - [Jilly] Cooper, you can always conceal a copy of one of her bonkbusters behind a dustjacket of Atlas Shrugged. Because Ayn Rand isn’t embarrassing at all.  

• Savage punch 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Visit http://www.free-webs.com/censorthebook/ - for an insight into monumental stupidity. Proudly trumpeted are the most censored books of last year. They include Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and, presumably due to the, uh, gay abandon of the subject matter, Justin Richardson, Peter Parnell and Henry Cole’s And Tango Makes Three, an acclaimed children’s story about a real life incident in which two male penguins in a zoo raise a penguin chick.  

• • What I’m reading: Gordon Forbes 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Ayn Rand’s famous book, Atlas Shrugged, had its 50th anniversary in the US while we were there. I read it long ago. (Its philosophies are being considered in the light of current problems in the US and, indeed, the world). It is also long (more than 1000 pages). It is a formidable feat of imaginative writing, with perhaps a deeper and more momentous theme. It is a heavier read - the words don’t slip past so easily - but the heroine, Dagne Taggart, is just as arresting, if not as bizarre, as Lisbeth Salander [of Stieg Larsson's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo].  

• Right-wingers grooving to bullion’s beat 
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The doomsday league is given at least some legitimacy by certain members of the Tea Party movement in the US. This lobby has high-profile sympathisers in the form of Sarah Palin and young Rand Paul. The latter is the son of revered libertarian Ron Paul, whose day job was Republican congressman. Ron (along with Ayn Rand) remains the intellectual forefather of the tea-partiers - and the extreme gold bugs.  

• Weddings and divorces 
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Off to the Groenberg outside Wellington yesterday for the wedding of the season between glamorous Seattle shoe-sales stunner Rachel Carrigan and Apollonian Andy Barns, winemaker and self-taught engineer at Mischa Estate. The knot was tied in the cellar by an Ali G and Ayn Rand quoting Presbyterian minister cum psychologist and I could swear the wedding march is on the Buddha Bar CD.  

• • Book case 
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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.  

• • Reviews: Biographies, posthumous fiction and new novels by Pamuk and Kingsolver 
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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.  

• My Port Alfred: Bev Young Director of tourism for the Ndlambe region 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Q:] What are you reading? [A:] I am re-reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I last read it when I was 19.  

• • ‘So what?’ Atlas shrugged 
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Atlas Shrugged  | When I’m asked which books have most influenced me [....] I’d love to say it was the literary greats, but can’t. Instead, two books immediately jump to mind. James Michener’s The Source shifted my understanding of religion at a fundamental level, while Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged gave me my first inkling of how philosophy could link in to life. I’ve always been a bit embarrassed to acknowledge these books without really questioning why.  

• Bookshelf show-offs 
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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.