Last night, I put Atlas Shrugged through the shredder. When I read it a couple years ago, I tried desperately to find redeeming qualities. Why? A dude. The dude I wrote about on Friday. It was a book I hadn’t read, he had, I thought having books in common would be good so I started with that one. It was two solid weeks of pain. If I remember correctly, two solid weeks with the new Harry Potter sitting on my desk taunting me.
But me and my pride had to finish reading Atlas Shrugged before reading the delicious book 6 from Harry Potter. I read it in two weeks and that included weekends with six hour stretches of reading the damn thing AND skipping over that painfully long speech at the end. Yesterday I was sitting on my couch and the blue spine of the book caught my eye.
I started to cry. None of the other books he recommended over the last few years have made me cry, but that one did. Perhaps it should have illustrated to me that we were never going to get together. Perhaps I should have known that I could never have a romance with a man who thinks Atlas Shrugged is something to enjoy.
Through my tears, I texted a couple friends. “Is it going to far to burn a book?” Nope. They all agreed, burn away. Double burn, cause it is Ayn Rand. But it was really cold last night and I didn’t feel like going all the way to the beach to burn it. Then I turned around and saw my tool.
My shredder. Ah. Fantastic. I ripped off the cover, bssssst. I ripped out the first few pages, bssssssssst. Then I realized that it was 900 pages long and I didn’t want to take all night, so I ripped out that awful speech and shredded it. Then I ripped out any section I’d marked with a post-it note and shredded those.
Some women have love letters and photographs to burn, I have a book. It felt strangely good to shred it. Don’t worry, I’m not in the business of shredding books and will never do it again. I also shredded journal entries about him and other guys while I was at it. I don’t need all that whiney mcwhine-a-lot littering my apartment.
Bsssssssst.
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