So after reading for about a month, I found out that the copy of Atlas Shrugged I ordered from amazon.com is literally missing the last 51 pages. They are simply not there. The book stops on page 1141 when it should go to 1192 pages. It just cuts off right in the middle of a chapter.
This is the most frustrating and outrageous thing that has happened to me in a long time.
The irony of the whole mess is that the book portrays a society where the men who us their rational minds--the creators--have essentially abandoned the world because of the men who don't use their minds--the parasites. The world crumbles with error after error as men all claim that it wasn't their fault, that they couldn't do anything about it. Gone are the people that created the machines and the systems that worked, and left behind are the people who don't understand how a machine works, but only knows how they've been told to operate it. When something happens that they don't understand, they don't do anything: they don't know any better, it's not their fault, it's not their responsibility.
And so here I am, prevented from finishing what is the greatest book I've ever read, and I'm not even qualified to use that tense.