Dear Diary: Idiotica
Working on the Book Review review this weekend, I got stuck on a line from Adam Kirsch’s piece about Anna Heller’s book.
Even today, Rand’s books sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year. Heller reports that in a poll in the early ’90s, sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, “Americans named ‘Atlas Shrugged’ the book that had most influenced their lives,†second only to the Bible.
Of course, I thought: the very idea of “the book that has most influenced my life” is one that only people who don’t read books would dream of entertaining. Young readers may be forgiven for enthusiastic replies — Brontë and Austen for the ladies, a fanlike arrangement of manly-men guides, running from Hemingway to Heinlein, for the gents — but no serious reader over the age of thirty can come up with a list of fewer than 100 “most influential” titles. That’s because literature is as interactive as the Internet.
Books not only answer books, they change as we age, so that, for me — for example — Jane Austen’s Emma is not one novel but six, a different book each time I’ve read it. I love Emma, and I’ve re-read it more often than any other novel, but to say that it’s “the most influential book”? What rubbish. Where would I put The Way We Live Now, or Harold Nicholson’s Kings, Courts, and Monarchy — not to mention the entire Mitford oeuvre. Not to mention the entire Lucia corpus! (Yes, I’m being a trifle silly.) Not to mention John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards!
The blockquote also suggests why Rand is highly regarded by the people who do read her: the only other book that they’ve read is the Bible. Even Atlas Shrugged is more entertaining than Kings and Chronicles.