My First Reaction to "Atlas Shrugged"

I'm a fan of Ayn Rand. I've always heard so many things about her, the philosophy she came up with, and I really enjoy learning about philosophy and things of the sort. So, I was eager to read a book written by her. As the book began, I was confused as to where the story was going. It does give a lot of details on the setting, the characters, etc., but I was not clear on what exactly was happening. The beginning of the book gave a feeling of something bad looming to happen, because of the "apprehension" that Eddie consistently spoke about. As the story goes on, we are introduced to characters such as James Taggart, an extremely stubborn man, and his sister Dagny Taggart, an authoritative woman (one of the few in that time) who knows what she is doing. Throughout the book, a question "Who is John Galt?" is posed multiple times -- it is actually even the first line of the novel. When characters in the novel say "Who is John Galt?" it simply means to not "...ask questions nobody can answer" (23). I feel that until the story evolves and reveals more and more, myself and other students reading the book will have questions in our mind such as "Who is John Galt?" because we do not know what exactly is happening yet and not having read a lot of the book we cannot answer the questions in our mind. I am eager to keep reading and really understand what Ayn Rand is trying to say with her philosophies, through her novels.