Book Review Basis

From the blog of Scott Aaronson, I found this juicy tidbit:

So, having now returned to Atlas out of curiosity, what can I say?  Numerous readers have already listed the reasons why, judged as a conventional novel, it’s pretty bad: wooden dialogue, over-the-top melodrama, characters barely recognizable as human.  But of course, Atlas doesn’t ask to be judged as a conventional novel.  Rand and her followers clearly saw it as a secular Bible: a Book of Books that lays out for all eternity, through parables and explicit exhortation, what you should value and how you should live your life.  This presents an obvious problem for me: how does one review a book that seeks, among other things, to define the standards by which all books should be reviewed?

According to Rand, the framework that she uses to evaluate her own work is the framework that every rational person should use to evaluate every work. She's called arrogant, but that descriptor is like calling someone arrogant who says that they know with certainty that 1 + 1 = 2.