Howard Roark’s philosophy leads him to strange places: working for an old, depraved former architect regarded as a failure; getting fired from his commission; drilling stones as a quarry worker. Eventually, Roark’s life expands: society begins to notice him through the newspaper and his controversial buildings. In portraying Roark’s perpetual conflict with the world around…
What would be your opinion of a book that opens with the line, “Howard Roark laughed.” then proceeds to describe a man standing at the edge of a sunlit cliff, surveying a dynamite explosion spraying granite across the water? It’s fitting, somehow, to begin Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. A seven hundred-page novel that, like its…
Anxious People hit home for me straight from the start, when Fredrik Backman—one of my favorite authors—made a raw, vulnerable confession: “our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks.” That picture—of people not knowing where…