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What was the first book about Objectivism that you read?

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For me, it was OPAR by Peikoff. I was 17 at the time, and I didn't know anything about Ayn Rand but I had seen her mentioned once in a while on the internet. My father is a libertarian who buys a ton of books, and I was browsing through the bookshelves in his bedroom when I came across OPAR. It looked interesting, so I read it.

 

What about you?

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Wow! That's quite a way to be introduced.

For me, it was Atlas Shrugged. I was supposed to read it for a college scholarship, but missed the deadline and picked it up a year later. About 1/3 into it I started skipping around in her nonfiction, too.

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Philosophy: Who Needs It? Was the first book I read but I was introduced by a friend who was personal trained by Mike Mentzer. He got another friend to read AS and Fountainhead and that person claimed it was the best book he ever read (AS). I read all of her non-fiction before even opening her fiction.

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A coworker loaned me a copy of ITOE. After that, it was most of the non-fiction before I got to the opus-magnum. One of the talk radio stations had a host that analyzed the news and news-makers  through the lens of his grasp of Ayn Rand's works. This was during the late 80's early 90's.

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"Virtue of Selfishness" .. a friend (not sympathetic to Objectivism then or later) gave it to me saying he'd just read this really odd/different book and he thought I might like it. I looked at the title and thought it was a silly gimmick... I mean, how can one say that selfishness is a virtue... but, I read it out of curiosity.

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I saw this video, which I found hilarious, and just imagined a book by Rand would be pretty cool for individualism - at the time I was very liberal-leaning, probably like an Andrei type. Then I heard a story on NPR about the "rape" scene in the Fountainhead, and it sounded fascinating a writer would create such a scene. I asked for Atlas Shrugged for my 18th birthday soon after, took a while to finish it, I tend to read slowly!

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I had read The Fountainhead for fun in my mid-teens, but I wasn't introduced to Objectivism as a philosophy until college.  My then-girlfriend was investigating libertarian ideology (she was a political science major) and I decided that, as a liberal, I would take on the strongest arguments to demonstrate how they were faulty.

 

I picked The Virtue of Selfishness and it kicked my ass.

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