A Fan's Playground

I just read A Clockwork Orange today, which I never really expected to do because dystopian novels about teenage violence are not really my thing. But there's a book club, and it was chosen, and it's short, so I read it. And you know what I forgot to take into account?

The use of language.

Let me tell you, that book is DAMN CAPTIVATING. I read the whole book in one sitting, and it leaves you running adrift on a sea of vocabulary that you only have a few clues about, but if you don't get hung up about it (which I didn't, because I spend a lot of time reading fanfic where vocab is the least of the things I don't know) the language just flows around you and you get caught up in it and mostly understand what's being said, and it's just FASCINATING.

And I mean, Burgess obviously had a really tight grip on what he was doing with language in that book, because he didn't just throw in alternate words here and there to make it sound "different" and thus "slangy". No, the entire rhythm of the language is subtly different and it just...oh, it is fantastic.

I LOVED reading it.

Even if it was super-depressing and rather horrifying.

(The other fascinating thing about the book: the last chapter. Some editions don't include it, and that ENTIRELY changes the meaning of the book. So, so much. And it is fascinating to think about the book from both perspectives and see how it changes. And also to think about how apparently that change was made because Burgess was told American audiences wouldn't find the last chapter believable, or something like that...)