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elisas8

elisas8

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The Fixer
Bernard Malamud, Jonathan Safran Foer
The Wayward Bus
John Steinbeck

A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess i had a lot of trouble with this book. first of all the language really threw me for a loop. (burgess makes up his own slang that the characters use, and it's mostly from russian or slavic languages, so i guess if you have a background in those languages you might have an easier time deciphering what's being said. i had a rough time with it.) once i got used to the language and had a pretty good idea of the meaning, the story got more interesting. the main character commits many, many acts of "ultra-violence" (beatings, rapes, murder) and i didn't enjoy reading about this, but once it became more about the morality of choosing good vs. evil and the validity of taking away that choice to ensure that they do good instead of evil, i got more interested. my copy was missing the final chapter (all american editions pre-1986 omit this chapter) but i found it online. that omission is an interesting moral dilemma as well, as it completely changes the tenor of the book. i'm wishing this was a bookclub book because it's one i'd like to have a discussion about, and probably one that i'll be thinking on for a while, but i didn't love it.a couple of passages to give an example of the language:"'We itty round, shop-crasting and the like, coming out with a pitiful rookerful of cutter each. And there's Will the English in the Muscleman coffee mesto saying he can fence anything that any malchick cares to try to crast. The shiny stuff, the ice,' he said, still with these like cold glazzies on me.""But there were the golosses of millicents telling them to shut it and you could even slooshy the zvook of like somebody being tolchocked real horrorshow and going owwwwwwww, and it was like the goloss of a drunken starry ptitsa, not a man."