I'm about four-fifths of the way through "Atlas Shrugged" now, and I've decided that I hate the dialog--especially the way that Hank Reardon and Dagney Tagert talk about love and sex. It's overly dramatic and wordy. I kind of wonder if Rand added the love interests as a way to tantalize and involve the reader, but I find them as out of place as if they had been written in a calculus textbook.

A lot has been made of Rand's philosophy. At this point, I'm thinking it's something like the philosophy of Thoreau/Emerson: "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string".

Here are some interesting Ayn Rand/Atlas Shrugged resources:

The Penguin Guide to Ayn Rand's writings: http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/atlas_shrugged.html

The SparkNote guide to the themes of Atlas Shrugged: http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/atlasshrugged/themes.html