Spending that much time on a book is a question for individual readers.īut it can be a bit of a chore.

In fact, a well-written book that is very long can be an extraordinary literary experience.īut the question remains, is Atlas Shrugged worth spending the time to actually read? At 30-pages an hour pace, it would take over 35 hours to read in the hardback version I bought. Don Quixote, War and Peace and even Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six were all over a thousand pages long and well worth the significant time it takes to read them. I am certain that many people have gone out to buy a copy of Shrugged, and then, realizing just how thick and long this behemoth of a book really is, either started but never finished it, or simply did not even begin the monumental task of reading it-most versions of the book are over 1,000 pages.įirst off, there is nothing against long books. And I am sure that many people have heard about what an opus Atlas Shrugged is, and how it is a “must read” and especially if they support capitalism or libertarian ideals. In fact, it is probably more relevant now than ever before in American history.

It is continually in most of the “Top 100” reading lists I have come across. Perhaps it was memories of these New Yorker reviews that caused people to begin attributing Ziff’s joke to Parker, starting in the 1960s.Atlas Shrugged is one of those books that probably everyone should read. I wish you could have heard that pretty crash “Beauty and the Beast” made when, with one sweeping, liquid gesture, I tossed it out of my twelfth-story window.ĭorothy Parker, writing as ‘Constant Reader’ (14 April 1928). I’m much better now, in fact, than I was when we started. That gifted entertainer, the Countess of Oxford and Asquith, author of “The Autobiography of Margot Asquith” (four volumes, neatly boxed, suitable for throwing purposes), reverts to tripe in a new book deftly entitled “Lay Sermons.”ĭorothy Parker, writing as ‘Constant Reader’ (22 October 1927). Jokes about throwing books long pre-date Ziff’s, and O’Toole found a couple of examples from Dorothy Parker: O’Toole was unable to identify the “critic”, and there is always the possibility that the joke was original to Ziff and attributed to an anonymous critic because it was funnier that way. One critic said: “ It is not a book to be lightly thrown aside. Miller, who contributes now and again to Inside Track, once wrote a book titled “To You I Tell It.” It received mixed reviews. This was investigated in 2013 by Garson O’Toole (aka ‘Quote Investigator’), who traced the joke back to a 1958 column by Sid Ziff, then sports editor of the Los Angeles Mirror News:

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