The Fountainhead. Dear god, I hated reading that damn book for Honors English. Our teacher had us 'optionally' read it for a chance at a scholarship. I say optionally because he had us write a paper on it and turn it in to him anyway, so you had to read it or your grade would suffer. At the end of the day, only myself and three other people actually read it all the way through, everyone else used cliffnotes and bullshitted their way through the paper. In retrospect, I wouldn't even call it immoral to have followed suit for once.
The biggest problem I have with this book (besides Ayn Rand and her ideology) is that nothing happens! It's slow, pandering to a very specific audience, and large sections of the book are just nonsensical. Whenever I rant about this book, I always feel the need to bring this up: the 12 page paragraph at the end. No, I'm not joking. Twelve pages, wall-o'-text. No indentations, no line breaks, just margin-to-margin text. The antagonist--if you can even call him that--is essentially talking to the protagonist about his life and the dreams he hoped to achieve, all while his 'varicose veins' and various postures are being described in such a depth that it's just creepy. And while I'd love to bring up the 'rape but not really rape scene because she wanted it in retrospect, but only after the fact that she was raped by the main character', I really don't remember it well enough nor care enough to try and articulate my feelings on just how insipid it is.
If anything good came out of this, it's that I never have to read this book again, and that we all suffered equally while reading this. Except for that one guy...
