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Okay, we are back!
I thought we'd start off with a ***, with "A Clockwork Orange."
So why pick this book? Well, one reason is that I'm teaching it in a class right now.
I'm re-reading it, and it's interesting -- I've read it many times before and find something new each time.
The book itself is interesting. It's very, very violent.
It's about a 15-year-old boy who lives in Britain, but it's a sci-fi novel, so is set in the future.
Although it was written in the 1960s, so technically, the future is now.
Anyway, in this future, kids run around in gangs, assaulting, raping, robbing, and fighting people.
It's not accepted so much as it is largely ignored -- until someone dies, anyway. Then someone will be arrested.
And that's what happens. The main character has three friends that he runs around with.
They like going to the milk bar, spiking their drinks with various drugs, then going out, robbing shops,
and beating up old men they find on the street, stuff like that.
One night, they all go to a house in the country. Bad stuff happens, and our main character is arrested and thrown in jail.
While he's in jail, he finds out that the government is experimenting on ways to make bad people good, using psychological conditioning.
When he realizes that this means a shorter sentence, he volunteers and is accepted.
They run various tests on him and try a few things, and are successful.
Every time he has a violent thought, witnesses it, or is a victim, he becomes physically sick.
It's as though he feels he's literally about to die. So he's incapable of hurting others.
The story is interesting because although we have this boy who was once a terrible person but is "reformed" by the state, it's not over.
A group of people are protesting the government's actions, calling it morally wrong.
They say that people should be free to make their own choices. Whether those choices are good or bad, they have the right to make them.
So when they find our main character and discover that he's attempted suicide as a result of what's been done to him,
they're thrilled and recruit him to be their poster child. But is this really moral behavior on their part?
After all, they're exploiting someone in a terrible situation. But who knows?
The story itself makes some interesting ventures into questions about choice, free will, and human nature.
Good and evil live within us, after all, and we are free to go either way when we choose.
The book also makes some interesting statements on the role of the state and how it can intrude into the lives of individuals.
It can force them to make certain choices -- or take those choices away entirely.
There are many different layers of meaning in the story, which is why I assigned it to my class!
The language itself is also interesting. It's written in Nadsat, which the author created. It's Russian-based slang.
This means that at first, you'll struggle to understand it, but when you stick to it, you acclimate and start taking in more.
It's a new language and a new way of looking at things, which forces you to wrestle with it.
This interaction helps ingrain the book's message a little deeper than most. The language itself also has many layers.
For instance, the word "horrorshow" might make you think of a scary movie, but in the book, it means "good."
So you have these kids running around committing terrible acts and calling them "horrorshow," but actually in a positive sense.
It's very interesting and deeply ironic.
I definitely recommend this book to all takers, as long as you bear in mind that it really is brutal. Still worth reading, though.
That about wraps it up. Thank yoU!