Book 27 : The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand - A Novella & 13 Stories by Gene H. Bell-Villada

I have no idea how this book ended up on my bookshelf. There are only a few hundred copies of it. It turns out that the author is this super anti-Rand professor at some college or another and had this book printed for a class of his. In any event, I'm glad I finally gave it a shot.

I'm pretty sure that if Woody Allen were huge into classical music, and Hispanic, this is the book he would have written.

I think if I'd read any of these short stories or the novella on their own, I would have really loved it. However, when grouped together they felt a little flat. First of all, every story was about the same protagonist - yet he had a new character for each one. So the voice was identical to the story before, yet there was an entirely new background. It made it really confusing at times, especially when the guy always ended up with a leading lady that was basically the same character - yet different - every time as well.

I also had an issue with these stories not really being, well, stories. Not a single one of them had any sort of conclusion. Almost all of them started out with a huge infodump, then set up a problem . . . and stopped, sans resolution.

He also clearly could have benefited from an editor. There were many instances of poor word choices that a simple read through from an unbiased eye could have picked up on. Note, for example, the excessive use of the word 'almost' in this passage :

"Oh, damn, English class, I'd almost clean forgot," he muttered. The bike ride across campus felt almost exhilarating. There was almost no one on the paths as he coasted along.

Those issues aside, I did really enjoy the book. It was peppered with all kinds of tongue in check attacks against Rand and Objectivism in general.

My favorite was easily a story called History Reconsidered which was actually a satirical review of a fake book called, Hitler Reconstructed : An American Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Third Reich, and Finds More Than a Few Things to Recommend. It included great lines like, "Can anyone who killed 20,000,000 Soviets really be half bad?"

Overall : I'm glad I read it and I would recommend a story or two to a friend, however, I don't think it worked as a volume.

7/10
YTD:
Books read : 27
Pages read : 8,032
Currently reading : The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter - Katherine Anne Porter & With These Hands - The Hidden World of Migrant Farmworkers Today by Daniel Rothenberg