I had a long period from the mid-80s to the early naughts where I stopped paying much attention to the libertarian movement, and I mainly ran around with a group of DC liberals and neoconservatives and then later with a group of gay Democrats.
The first group were mainly college and graduate students or people recently graduated, and among them was at least one really close friend with whom I had a two person book club. We read a lot of modern fiction together, Michael Chabon, Armistead Maupin, Fay Weldon, Martin Amis. Lots of gay fiction. I also read lots of essentially “Russian novels,” huge panoramic novels that create whole worlds and often have an underlying philosophy, and often written by Russian or Russian Jewish émigrés. It’s always remarkable to me that the insectoid critics of Ayn Rand don’t see any literary similarities between Rand, Tolstoy and Saul Bellow. The drive to create a whole world in a giant novel isn’t specifically Russian, since John Steinbeck and George Elliot among others also produced my beloved giant novels.
So it was sad, amusing, and not unexpected to see the truly pathetic commentary on Chinua Achebe in mediocre appreciations like that in the Washington Post where halfwits look at Achebe, see a black face, and say he wrote about colonialism and opposed “the West.” I devoured Achebe back in the decades where I chain smoked novels, and he seems to me to be another Saul Bellow (almost a Larry David), even with a touch of Christopher Buckley (and Ayn Rand), who writes about Lagos instead of Chicago, Washington, or New York. His work is universal and transcendent, and funny. Only a diminished person would read it and think it is only about Nigeria or Africa. He satirizes bureaucracy and statism (which may have been brought to his home by colonialism) that exist in the post-colonial period. All libertarians should read him and libertarian humanities academics should be writing about him.
His first book, Things Fall Apart, besides the Atlas Shruggy title, is an attack on centralization, central planning, imperial capital cities, and bureaucracy, and that continues through his later work. One Wiki synopsis: