Atlas Shrugged II: Electric Boogaloo

I've never been able to take anyone who takes Atlas Shrugged seriously seriously, at least where politics, economics, or aesthetics are concerned. And no, I haven't read more than a few pages of this literary cement overshoe, mainly because, after ten pages or so, I kind of figured a) that the novel's odds of improvement were long and b) that the siren call of thousands of more interesting diversions, including doing the dishes and cleaning my computer screen, easily lured me from Ayn Rand's cardboard characters and turgid prose. Besides, I'm not a book reviewer by trade, so nobody's ever offered to pay me to endure 1,100 pages of Rand's nonsense, the gist of which I had already absorbed from a political science class in the form of Rand's equally silly but mercifully shorter essay collection The Virtue of Selfishness.

Still, it is gratifying to see that one of the charming someones at McSweeney's spent enough time with Atlas Shrugged to write this brilliant, timely parody.