I liked it enough to have read it twice haha. So yes, some people do dig it. I suppose you're not inclined to continue with Rand, but I also really liked The Fountainhead.
Spot on. It's a book written for idealogues I guess. I really liked all the characters in Atlas. Dagney was a bit weird, but I'm sure Rand patterned her after her own heroic image of herself. I loved the mystery of the $ cigarettes, disappearing barons of industry, the attack on the looters of the world, the "invention", and the finale.
I thought The Fountainhead was a much tighter book. Which is odd to say because it's still 750 pages lol. But while it might not be as developed as an ideological treatise, it's a much better novel. Of course, I'm the son of an architect, so maybe that has something to do with it lol...
Atlas is just SO much more heavy-handed. I think Rand wrote it to be the defining book promoting her philosophy, and so the mission creep of making sure the philosophy was what she wanted it to be meant that it was too long and much less well constructed as a novel.
Don't get me wrong... I've also read it twice. I think its good outweighs the bad. But I honestly think it could be a lot better if you trimmed 500+ pages out of it and improved the writing. And that would make it more effective at what Rand wanted, i.e. promoting her philosophy, because fewer people would either be put off by the length or get tired of the book because the first 600 pages are really, well, slow.