My god. The fountainhead really gave me a false sense of how bad atlas shrugged is in comparison. Like there's obviously a bunch of dumb bullshit in that too--another weird non-consenual encounter, Roark blowing up a housing project because he's a selfish egotistical little shit, etc.--but that is at least readable and has characters you can imagine actually existing in the real world, and the message (or at least the one I got out of it) that institutions will stifle progress and innovation for the sake of maintaining power is decent, even if her intention for putting that message in there is to argue that a manchild can destroy housing for the poor because the engineer made slight alterations to his blueprint.

But this, fuck me. This feels like it was written by an alien or a dog or something, a being that isn't human but is making guesses about how humans think and feel about things. I might have to do the self harm of reading this book, I'm too transfixed by how idiotic all these passages are.