Ever read Ayn Rand?

I've read her.

She writes like a Soviet, as if everyone in the story is blazoned with a marxist name tag or a DIck Tracy moniker.

I have.

The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged and Anthem.

The last one I only read because it inspired Rush's album "2112."  Which is one of my all-time favorites.

Luckily, it was fairly short.

The other two were quite a slog.

I see her career as tragic. If you read Fountainhead, there are moments in which things she says are actually beautiful - the architect's values - love of work and creativity above hope for fame or riches. But in the end she ruins it. She was an iconoclast who destroyed her own idol. The architect forgets the apartment complex he risked his life for and takes a big, fat check from the man who was persecuting him to make a memorial to him in the form of a skyscraper, a place where the men in gray who thought his ideas were dangerous could go about their dull, dismal lives.

Yes.

I won't be doing it again.  Her "philosophy" (I use the word loosely) is laughable, and her prose is terrible.

I bought atlas shrugged at a thrift store for about $2 because none of that will go to AR's estate.  But I haven't read it yet. 

Yes and loathed it. She's fecking awful. 

Yes I read The Fountainhead (a whale of a book).  As an architect, I was amused by how much bollox it was, but nothing compared to the depiction of Howard Roark by a superannuated Gary Cooper and the divine Patricia Neal as his squeeze in King Vidor's mess of a movie.

Yes, although I've only read Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead.  I don't care for Rand's writing nor her world view, but I thought I'd better give it a fair go since her work seems to be practically worshipped by some.  

Since Marx has entered the discussion, I treat his writing, as opposed to his legacy, as the same way I do Darwin's. I don't enjoy the style of writing but it was important to me to understand their own arguments in their own words.  In both cases they started schools of thought that have grown beyond their original studies and with the passage of time our understanding of everything, history, science, sociology, etc has developed, gone beyond and sometimes contradicted their C19th understanding.  For example, Marx's personal understanding of the evolution of the family is completely at odds with anthropology and his sharp division between production and reproduction does not hold up to economic historians.  As an aside, Mary Douglas should also be added to the list of thinkers whose ideas have grown beyond the scope of their original studies.  Her grid and group theory is everywhere under different guises.  It's much more far reaching than her better known work on purity vs impurity.

It's an idealistic view of capitalism if I remember correctly. Karl Marx Communist Manifesto is similar in that it's idealistic political philosophy that falls dramatically short when put in practice.

To each his own. Your dislike of it does not make it a bad book. You probably couldn't even get a letter-to-the editor of your highschool paper published. FAIL.