You should read at least one although I will warn you she isn't the best of writers and both books are long. Still, you should decide for yourself about her ideas not just take the scorn of people who don't like her philosophy as any indicator of whether there is value in what she had to say.

I think in truth her philosophy doesn't really come across well in her fiction. There is a book called Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by her "heir" Leonard Peikoff that is a work stating her philosophy in a more traditional philosophical format. If you want to skip the fiction and read that instead it is actually a fairly interesting book.

You can decide for yourself but I hardly doubt that most people who deride her philosophy have even read her. I did, and while I don't personally agree with much of her thinking, I chose to ignore naysayers and find out what it was about for myself and am all the more intellectually rich because of it.