Atlas Shrugged had a profound influence on me, too.

It is a treatise on selfishness. A stench of arrogance leaks out from every paragraph. It showed me the worst of the worst. What not to be. I like to think reading it made me a more empathetic, social, caring person. It also awakened my antenna to the vileness in people that may lie just below the skin.

That is was excruciatingly badly written was a bonus. It showed me that dangerous ideologies are persistent enough to survive laughably poor communication.