Mysteries, Writers, and Ranting (Rachael Marks)

Early into the reading I was immediatly taken in to everything that was going on. It felt as if something in the book had changed, I am still not entirely sure what, but I feel it was something within the tone. With Dagny going on her journey to find the inventor of the motor of all motors it just seemed so unlike what I had read up to the motors discovery. It actually was exactly what I thought the book was going to be after I had read the first fourty pages. It was, for a moment, a book about a journey, like "Anthem". There was something new about it that made it feel like a detective story or even, at some points, a murder mystery. Dagny was going around like she was in an Agatha Christie book. The story did seem to have an essence of Nancy Drew or Sherlock Holmes to it, but with less of the action. Dagny went around talking to such interesting characters (ones that I would deffinitely expect to find in the mystery genre) and getting little clues from them that lead her journey along. Eventually she is lead to a roadblock, as you must have in mystery novels or else everything would seem to simple. Of course, the entire story has an air of mystery to it, but something about these pages made it different. What I disliked, and of course not only in this specific point of the novel, was the way Rand characterizes authors. She makes them look like complete, jaded, trite, imbeceles. She does this with a lot of her characters that she would like to use as antagonists, but for some reason the authors irk me the most. Ayn Rand is an author, a part of me finds it respectable of her to oppose her own craft, but she does it in annoying manner. I understand that some writers are not geniuses (considering what is considered a "best selling novel" these days) but not even authors who write paranormal teen fiction are as unoriginal and idiotic as Lee Hunsacker. That man was a wreck. This is where I come to object to Rand's writing, when she puppetiers her characters. She has to make the antagonists, or whomever is not in aggreeance with her ideas, look like a total dumbass. Jim Taggart I can stand, but enough is enough! Of course, this is her own novel, she can do what she wants, but for me, this element has become quite intolerable.