Benjamin Hare > Recent Status Updates

This book just keeps getting better the more I read it. Each time through I find something new to appreciate.

Finished "People of the Black Circle." Love the first half of that story and loath the last half. Glad to be starting "The Hour of the Dragon."

Egalitarianism and Inflation. "[T]he best economist in Atlas Shrugged was Ragnar Danneskjold." The Stimulus and the Response. An absolutely brutal evisceration of B.F. Skinner's book "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" (1971). The Establishment of an Establishment. Censorship: Local and Express.

Mind-blowing essays. Two instituted something of an existential crisis: "The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made" and "Kant Versus Sullivan."

The People of the Black Circle.

"Vasarien" changed everything. I went from being so-so on Legotti to a ravenous fan. This single story is so brilliant, so well constructed, and so enchanting that it beggars belief. I've not read such a thrilling macabre tale in decades. Thank you S.T. Joshi for introducing me to Legotti.

Legotti's prose continue to impress, though I'm beginning to recognize a pattern with his endings: they are maddeningly vague, in most cases. So far, the best short, by far, has been "The Chemyst." The most impressive, from a technical standpoint, was "Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story." Alas, the ending fell flat. Still, I'm happy to have been exposed to Legotti and enjoying my reading.

I'm past the point of being bored with this book but am determined to finish it. The prose are decent but don't sparkle. The characters are touchingly well portrayed, even the villain. Little actually happens in the book, however. The best part is the sexual undercurrent. I'm more interested in predicting when Jeremy will finally get into Carols panties, or (even better) Deborah's.

Read only a meager amount this week, mainly because a mere five pages of Atlas spurred additional reading. I'm struggling to remain focused on Galt's speech rather then stopping every few pages to do additional reading of source material. The epistemological payload of this speech is staggering, and more than a little bit intimidating.

Who knew that the memoirs of a domestic oil "explorationist" could be so engaging.

John Galt's speech. The most difficult, but more important, section of the book.

The Frolic, Les Fleurs, Alice's Last Adventure, Dream of a Manikin, and The Chemyst. Excellent prose. Atmosphere, and character to spare. A macabre delight.

Cherryl's fate doesn't get any easier, regardless of how many times I read it.
Dagny finally learns where John Galt has been hiding out these past fifteen years. Reardon learns the truth about himself, and those around him. The world is beginning to crumble.

The continuing unraveling of Jim Taggart and, what is for me the most heart-wrenching portion of the book, witnessing Cherryl's benevolent outlook turn to despair under the crushing weight of revelations about Jim and his friends. Honestly, I can only a read a few pages at a time. Literature can be brutal at times.

Johann Most, and Louis Lingg. A mere ten pages of text provided two weeks of additional reading. Both of these anarchists are worth studying.
Their stories are incredibly compelling. Lingg's life, imprisonment, and death is difficult to fully comprehend, let alone believe. If you ever wanted a reason to hate the State, here it is.

The Scarlet Citadel, Queen of the Black Coast, Black Colossus, and Iron Shadows in the Moon. I'm just starting Xuthal of the Dusk, one of my favorites. It's incredible just how much I look forward to cracking this book open each evening before bed. I hope that joy never leaves me.

The Pheonix on the Sword. The Frost-Giant's Daughter. The God in the Bowl. The Tower of the Elephant. All of these stories just seem to get better and better the more I read them. It's remarkable how stories that I've read so many times, over more than three decades, can still engage my interest. Honestly, I'm a bit embarrassed by just how often I keep returning to Howard's Conan corpus.

Fascinating. This book took over my reading for the week. Each interview delves (briefly) into some aspect of his own past, and his history researching Lovecraft's work. Joshi is a rare example of a man entirely dedicated, heart and soul, to his one overriding passion: exploring the works and life of HP Lovecraft. I've got a long list of additional authors to read, based on Joshi's repeated recommendations.

Bakunin and Spooner. Both are lucid writers. Bakunin's particular interpretation of socialist is intriguing, and entirely new to me. He wants to have his cake and eat it too; he argues for individualism in opposition to the inevitable outcome of state-run socialism. Quite original. Spooner I'm still on the fence about. He's a wizzo rhetorician, but his conclusions leave me at lose ends. Need to read more.

It's the beginning of the end. Dagny has left Atlantis and returned to the world after her month-long stay as a semi-prisoner. Dr. Robert Stadler witnesses the unveiling of "Project X."

So far it's been a good history lesson, but each essay spawns hours of research because I want to know more about the authors, and the times in which each essay was written. This book is going to take me a while to complete.

'Rip Van Winkle' by Washington Irving, 'Young Goodman Brown' by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and 'The Heroic Slave' by Frederick Douglass. So far it's been an interesting read, but only mildly so.

Dagny has arrived in Atlantis and I'm doing so much research on previous sections that my progress has slowed to a handful of pages each day. Although I've read this book at least nine times, this most recent read-through (my first in six years) feels like I'm starting to truly grok it's deeper abstractions.

Got the thesis, then quickly got bored with the repetitive prose. It's possible (but unlikely) that I'll come back and finish this. Moving to DNF.

Moving this book over to DNF. My lack of Hegel and Lacan is inhibiting my ability to digest whatever it is Zizek's rambling, dense word-salad is trying to convey. I've read ONE book by Hegel and despised every minute of it, so it's doubtful I'll ever have the stomach to come back to Zizek's book. Still, I'll shelve it in case my future self wants to give it another go.

Directive 10-289 is unleashed. The Taggart Tunnel disaster wrenches Dagny back to her office. Reardon and Francisco face off in Dagny's apartment in one of the most explosive, but nuanced scenes in the book. Quentin Daniels offers his resignation and Dagny races off to Utah in hopes to keep him working on the motor. During the trip she meets the tramp who worked for the Twentieth Century Motor Co. Stunning.