Anthem

I just finished Anthem by Ayn Rand and I would recommend it to anyone who has 2 hours and wants to read a really good short story. The story is a dystopian view of the future in which something cataclysmic happened and all technology has been wiped out (the candle had to be reinvented). The story is told from the first person in the form of journal entries. In this future everyone lives in a world-wide collective and works with their brothers and for their brothers. Everyone has a specified duty and everything, from where people sleep to their names to how fast technology is developed, is controlled by the state. The main character is named Equality 7-2521 and everyone else has similar names. This is Rand’s ode to the self in which she deifies the self over the collective. Her views of communism come out strong in this story (she was born and raised in Russia before moving to America at the age of 21)

I won’t tell anything else about the story because I knew absolutely nothing about it going in and I thought it was an amazing story. It’s a short story (only 105 pages in the copy that I got) and it should only take about 1 ½ to 2 hours to read.