I'm *trying* to push myself to read more classics this year (it's not going too well so far). I love a good dystopian fiction and have heard this talked about so much that I really wanted to read it. Spoiler alert: I was not a fan at all. I struggled a lot with the language in it, the plot just all a bit too much in your face with the violence, and it felt like it was done just for shock value with no purpose (which I assume was the point, but I just wasn't a fan).
A Clockwork Orange centres around a teen called Alex who's head of a gang. When he's arrested for murder after a string of violent crimes, he becomes a candidate for a new criminal punishment technique that is designed to turn 'bad' people into 'good' ones. The book is focused on the idea of free will, and whether you can be 'good' if your innate 'badness' has been tortured out of you and you no longer have a choice but to be good.
The book was very very dark, more so than I'd imagined. The violence permeated the whole novel: first with violence Alex commits (including rape, murder and brutal attacks), and then with violence committed against Alex. The story at the heart of the novel is interesting, but I found there wasn't *that* much plot. I felt like the slang used by Burgess throughout the novel made you distanced from the characters, who ultimately were all quite 2D - Alex was just a stereotypical violent youth who only changes when he is forced to, and ultimately ends up exactly the same as he was at the start of the novel.
This was a tough read for me to get through, despite how short it was. I gave it two stars because it was an interesting book, but I just hated the writing so much.
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