liking Atlas Shrugged at 12 to 15 y.o.  -- while feeling oppressed by one's homeroom teacher and smothered by the galling mediocrity of middle school -- seems pretty normal to me.  it's a ducky book for selfpitying, bright, bored adolescents stuck in a braindead school system.  kind of a Harry Potter of its day, casting "the less bright than me" as the Muggles.  though few 15 year olds these days, I think, would make it through that monstrous soliloquy of Galt's (the radio speech) about 3/4 of the way through.  yaaaawn.  he made Castro sound terse.

yer, it's a lovely adolescent fantasy.  all the Right Thinking People will be tall and handsome, athletic and brilliant -- the world will be plasticene in their hands once they just move those infernal lower beings  -- ideological peasants! -- outta the way.  the novelistic version of every unpopular kid's late-night reveries:  "and when I grow up I will be beautiful and rich and powerful and then they will all be sorry, so there."  kind of a graphic novel before there were graphic novels, let alone ironic or satirical graphic novels that knew how to mock their own adolescent angst :-)

what used to tie my brain in a knot was how Taggart and Galt swear up and down, on a stack of dollars as it were, that no one should ever serve another or even do an unpaid favour for another... and then she proceeds to cook him breakfast and probably do the washing-up as well :-)  Rand just never could figure out how to reconcile her fantasy of the Domineering Manly Man (and hence the programmatic need for her female protagonist to be Romantically and suitably Dominated and subservient) with her "every person is an island, life is predation, take no prisoners, show no mercy" ideology.  now if Dagny had rigged a hostile takeover of Galt's company, outwitted him at every turn, and finally driven him into pitiful bankruptcy, the ideology would have been purer but it wouldn't quite have worked plotwise...

still, at about 11 or 12 I confess I loved the cartoonish, oversized characters, the grandiosity, the simplistic goodguy/badguy costume drama, the pompousness, and most of all the fact that it went on and on and on... being a quick reader I was often frustrated by books that ended too soon.  nowadays I rely on Trollope to feed the "everlasting gobstopper" demon when it strikes :-)

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...