Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

I can't recommend this book because it is 64 hours long. Ain't nobody got time for that.

I can't recommend it for the rational philosophy of objectivism either. I would argue against it except I zoned in and out through a bunch of the preachy parts so I couldn't do it justice. Ain't nobody got time to re-listen to that.

Also every character in the whole world is a complete asshole with only one exception, and that single exception was literally a feudal serf.

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Norwegian Wood by By Haruki Murakami

Far far far better book than Atlas Shrugged, but I still don't want to recommend this book to anyone. Maybe some people recommend it for the same reasons I don't.

The story is in internal struggle of a college-age guy, and for almost the whole story the emotions and motivations seemed just a bit too alien for me to get. I don't know if it's cultural differences or lost-in-translation or if this alienness is intended.

My wife almost never likes stories without happy endings, but that generally doesn't bother me at all. But with this book I started getting the 'everything is going badly' feeling long before the end, and it got to me in a way that most books don't because whatever other themes there are, the book is about how incredibly fragile minds are.

So I didn't enjoy it. The characters were like a house of cards - holding each other up but also being knocked down by each other and everyone around them.