I've gotten bogged down in Atlas Shrugged during the 50+ page speech that John Galt gives over the commandeered radio frequencies. The sad truth is that nobody's going to listen to you go on for fifty pages worth of a speech, even in an 1100-page novel. I figure that's at least three hours if read aloud, and most people would have said, "Okay, we get it, we get it! How about the Cliff Notes version, buddy?"
Anyway, I'm taking a break from it right now and reading a "new" book by J.R.R. Tolkien. He's surprisingly prolific for a man who has been dead since 1973. Actually, his son Christopher edited the manuscript, as he did with the rest of his father's posthumous published works. The book is The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, a retelling of the old Norse sagas translated into English verse. I've been reading the introductory material for the last couple of days, off and on. I'll have to hurry up and get to the meat of the book, the eight-line stanzas, since I only have it for two weeks.
