Lovely Little Shelf

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand

Today I was really going back and forth between doing Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and The Fountainhead. Quite the extremes, huh? I decided to save Chicka Chicka Boom Boom for another day, so here we go.

When I was in high school, I had one of the greatest English teachers of all time.  She dressed up like Romeo, cried during To Kill a Mockingbird, laughed at our jokes and genuinely enjoyed us, and it showed.  I had her for freshman english, and again in later grades for speech and humanities.  It was during one of these later classes that she gave me info on a scholarship where you had to read The Fountainhead and then write something about it.  She said that it was a harder book, but she knew I loved to read and she really thought that I could do it.

So I did.  And I loved it.  Maybe part of that love was that it was a tough book and it made me think.  Up to that point, I had read very few novels that weren’t “just” novels.  A book that teaches/shows an entire new philosophy?  This was a wholly new thing for me.  I loved all the little descriptive details and the seriously unlikeable characters.

I remember the scene where Dominique buys the expensive statue that she loves, only to bring it home and crash it down the stairs.  She said that she knew that no one else could appreciate its beauty like she did so she didn’t want anyone else to even see it.  I must have read this thirty times.  For some reason that just rang true to me, and in my copy it’s dog-earred.  I come back to it over and over.

The whole book blew me away.  I remember reporting back to my teacher and letting her know that not only did I finish it, but I liked it.  She was totally shocked and wrote down a whole list of books for me to read.  Some of my favorite books of all time have come from that list.

I never did do the scholarship writing thing.  I’m not always a finisher.  But I have read all of Ayn Rand’s books.  For me, this one always stands out, but I’m pretty sure it has a lot to do with who gave it to me and the time in my life that I read it.

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