"The book that really made me a reader was a pretty bad book indeed: Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand."

"When I read it I was a young and hungry lunkhead who was just realizing that the world was leaving me behind: her perfect reader. I’d been a screw-up in high school and only in my senior year had started to realize that a certain train (Success) was leaving the station and that I might not be on it. Atlas Shrugged seemed to say that my being left behind was not my fault – the whole system was corrupt, and run by whiny jerks, and such an unjust system naturally discriminated against genuine and uncorrupt people like me. I also liked the idea (if Rand was to be believed) (and she was so forceful!), that all I had to do to be good was to believe very strongly/selfishly in myself – which, lo and behold, came naturally. I liked the easy way the Rand reader was encouraged to understand and dismiss suffering as the fault of the (weak, self-indulgent, handout-seeking) sufferer. This eliminated a lot of things I didn’t like: ambiguity, confusion, the struggle of ideas, the possibility that all was not known. In my defense, I hadn’t read a novel since third grade, so the very act of reading a novel was pretty wonderful – all those pages, situations, speeches! Rand’s ideas seemed to be coming to me from a world I had never been to – they seemed European, encoded, sophisticated. All that certainty! All those apparent rapes that actually were, we would later find out, pretty much consensual!"

Writes George Saunders in "The Book That Made Me A Reader..."