ANTHEM (Chump Change Edition)

I feel like an idiot. I made it halfway through this book before realizing that what I thought was stylistically strange diction was in fact just someone's butchery of a translation. I thought Rand's apparent thesaurus abuse, her use of a denotatively similar word in place of the correct one, was another jab at collectivism and a stylistic illustration about the importance of individual identity. It's not. Her actual prose is much less opaque. Here's one of her paragraphs: "And there it was that we saw Liberty 5-3000 walking along the furrows. Their body was straight and thin as a blade of iron. Their eyes were dark and hard and glowing, with no fear in them, no kindness and no guilt. Their hair was golden as the sun; their hair flew in the wind, shining and wild, as if it defied men to restrain it. They threw seeds from their hand as if they deigned to fling a scornful gift, arid the earth was as a beggar under their feet."The kindle version here writes: "And there it turned into that we saw Liberty five-3000 taking walks alongside the furrows. Their body changed into instantly and thin as a blade of iron. Their eyes have been darkish and difficult and sparkling, with no fear in them, no kindness and no guilt. Their hair changed into golden as the solar; their hair flew in the wind, shining and wild, as though it defied guys to restrain it. They threw seeds from their hand as though they deigned to fling a scornful present, and the earth become a beggar under their toes."Having never read Rand before, and having never seen Amazon sell a book so wildly inaccurate, I made it halfway through before downloading another version to check. This one isn't what you want. Pay the $8 for a real copy.

This is an amazing story, but hobbled by a terrible printing. The production quality of this publication is so bad that I'm returning it.First and foremost, this story is a fantastic tale about a man struggling with his individuality in a dystopian communist society. It should be required reading for everyone, as to the dangers of group thinking and how it can inhibit innovation and creativity. I won't give too much away, but the unusual writing style captures the reader at the very first paragraph and takes them on an immersive journey.Having said that, this is a terrible publication. The production quality is terrible. The color cover is low-resolution and full of JPG compression artifacts. While that doesn't detract from the story, it's a sign of the amateur design that extends to the text. The real problem is inside. The margins are huge. That may be useful for some readers who want room to annotate, but the person doing the layout went with an absurdly small typeface. I measured it: its 7 points high. By comparison, most books are 10-12pt. Some books may go down to 9pt but 7pts is just ridiculous. The book is quite thin at 42 pages of 6x9 inch paper, so I can't find a compelling reason to make the point size so small. Given that the story is a quick read with short chapters, the publisher could have gone up to 10pt type and reduced the margins to something reasonable and not added any pages to it. It's completely unnecessary and renders the publication unreadable to many readers.

We read this for a college class, and it was pretty much unanimous across the class - as with the professor - that no one much cared for this book and it's messages. It's WAY overkill with how 'strict' the society is, so much so that the story was difficult to even take seriously and a little laughable. It also didn't help that Rand seemed among the privileged in her own personal life, and that because she lost her privilege she lashed out and made stuff like this. Also I don't know if it was because of the translation, or just Rand's style, but the sentence structure was just really blocky, blunt, and kind of goofy to read, and made it a little difficult to take seriously.As well, the ending was highly unsatisfying for me, and just didn't sit right. The solution to everything is to only care about yourself and 'build a wall' to keep all others out? Yes, perhaps for those who are born into privilege and have 'things' that works great - let everyone else who happened to be born in a less fortunate situation suffer unnecessarily, and blame their situation on 'not working hard enough'. A little more than immature and escapist.

Obviously nuttier than an explosion in a snickers factory, the author excels in defining the individual against the collective, in a more humane way than her other works, leaving the reader contemplating the intricacy of thought between I and we.After reading this, I could not stop thinking of the many parts of I against the many aspects of We and pondering the subtleties of these thoughts, such as selfishness or value, individualism and the collective.For such a short write, this really took over my thoughts and made me want to instantly reread.A great concept, in what must have been a softening of her philosophies that are so divisive, where she sees the humanity within against the machine of being controlled.Ignore the politics of what she stood for and enjoy this for what it is, a very relatable story that ponders thoughts we have all had.Would highly recommend.

Confession - like many, I'm only aware of Ayn Rand because of Neil Peart's lyrics from the early 70s - 2112 specifically - which always resonated but never quite gave me the urge to read her books; always been on the list but never got to the top. Finally got round to it recently with Anthem, which is an obvious easy introduction, and this is my take on it.No question it starts off as an awkward read with the use of "we" rather than "I", which deliberately jars but makes sense in the context - it got me all the way through, but I can see why she did that. I liked the way she named characters - for example International 4-8818 and the main protagonist, Equality 7-2521 - it emphasised the de-personalisation of the society she was writing about - and set a tone which lasted throughout.I also liked the guilds that sections of society were arbitrarily put in - The House of The Street Sweepers, The World Council of Scholars, and the fantastic House of The Useless (where folks ended up when they were too old to work) - would have been good to have seen the mechanism for how people were assigned to these various destinations, but I guess it's just a novella & that would have taken too long.The story does pick up after what feels like quite a long introduction, and anyone who knows 2112 will recognise where it's going - take it as a philosophical tract or just a story, but the underlying message is pretty clear.Ultimately it's a pretty simple story about one man's struggle against the system and how he breaks free from it whilst never forgetting his his romantic interest - but it's quite well-told and thought-provoking if you're in the mood for it. I liked it & will explore her works further - while the priests allow them to still be available...

I was inspired to finally read this book after the passing Neil Peart. Rest in peace, your music will live on.

Anthem was written before Rand's more famous novels and is somewhat more of a statement of individual value, rather than having any great story-arc. Iit's an easy read, with obvious off use of language being integral to the setting - such as the use of collective pronouns. From a contemporary perspective, that casts an interesting light on the invented 'pronouns' the totalitarian Marxist twitter hate-mobs insist on. Hail Gina Carano boop/bop/beep!

Anthem is a dystopian novella that is effectively a political statement about the dangers and evils of communism written in the historical context of the 1930s. It is a celebration of the spirit of the individual over the collective, and it is intentionally simplistic. It is meant to make a statement, and clearly Rand is not suggesting that it is never good to collaborate with others or do things for the benefit of others. While Anthem has been influential, in my opinion the overall literary quality is not on par with the best works of dystopian literature such a 1984 or with Ayn Rand's other books, even taking into account that Anthem is shorter and meant to be more of an allegory than a novel.