What book are you most ashamed of actually having read?
“There is no shame in reading,” Lane says.
Others beg to differ. Madden mourns the hours he spent sitting through Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead; Elliott, likewise, rues the day she agreed to teach Rand’s Anthem to her dystopian-lit class, as a way of compromising with students who thought her syllabus too “left wing.”
“During the week that we discussed it in class,” she recalls, “I hid it in a secret compartment of my messenger bag, terrified that somebody would mug me, force me to empty the bag, and ridicule me when they saw that wretched book tumble out.”