I was expecting this book to be about fiction writing, but it turned out to be something else entirely. It wasn't something I enjoy so I was dissapointed.

This book is scary in the way it links horrible Russian literature to the mindset of our politicians today. By tracking the evolution of egotistic individualism as a guiding principle that influences our culture today, we learn that even bad written works can influence the world and shape policy.,

The strong voice, and accessible writing had a lot to do with engaging me on this controversial work - associating Ayn Rand just because she's Russian to Dostoevski seemed (and still does) odd to me - but Weir succeeds, and I was slowly won over that his premise that she influenced someone like the economist Alan Greenspan to shape economy as he did to detriment of US economy, leading to 2008 crisis, is har to swallow - but suspending disbelief, I managed it at least for duration of this strange robust argument. Interesting reading but only for someone interested in literature and its purported direct effect on practical life.

I probably didn't read the publisher's information carefully enough. I hoped to learn more about why Ayn Rand captures so much adolescent attention and why so many adults who should know better are besotted by her terrible fiction. I guess I have a bit more understanding of the literary genre ... maybe? But I'm still bewildered by it. The author goes into quite a lot of plot detail as he talks about Chernyshevsky's Chto Detats (What is to Be Done) and Rand's books and explores Dostoevsky's and Nabokov's rejection of these authors' uses of fiction and arguments for a "ideal" (actually horrible) world. So more information about the specifics of some bad writing but not enough for my taste on its social and cultural effects.