WOW! This book was incredible. Or should I say "real horror-show" lol (you wont get that unless you read the book) Anyway, I was a bit worried when I first bought this book. I ordered it from Amazon.com because it was a best seller and had a ton of great reviews. It was written in the 1960's so that also scared me a little since I heard it was hard to read. The second I opened the book I looked over at my wife and said "I don't know how long this is going to last". Not only was it seemingly hard to read but it has its own language called the "Nadsat" language or "teenage vocabulary of the future". So I decided to try about 10 pages and see if it starts to make sense. And thanks to the glossary I had to check almost every other word in the first couple chapters, it grew on me. Actually, I believe I can now speak fluent “Nadsat” haha. A few days later I finished and now I wish I took my time because I'm sad its over.
The book has some very disturbing parts to it but nonetheless, it was excellent. It is about a young 15-year-old boy named Alex. He hangs with his "droogs" which is more or less his gang. They go around the town causing trouble on a daily basis and they love it. After school, when they decide to go to school, they set off to the local "bar" and drink these milk drinks that are spiked with drugs and alcohol which get them all loaded. Then they go to houses of elderly or innocent people and steal from them while beating them to near death (in some cases death) then head on to the next plan of action. If that isn't disturbing enough, the droogs, in many cases, rape young girls and beat old men crossing the street for fun. This goes on and on and you may think that that would not be something interesting to read about, but the language and how it is narrated is so addicting. You even start to like the main character. Anyway, the young kids wind up fighting with each other over who is the leader and this results in a lot of tension between them. On a ordinary night for them they break in to a woman's house and this time they get caught. Well, Alex does anyway, while his friends run away and leave him for the police. I don't want to give everything away, so I am leaving a lot out but this ends part 1 (3 parts in the book). Part 2 brings Alex to jail as a young kid and he becomes an experiment of the government to change criminals in to good people. The way they go about this is very hard to picture, but to make it short, they force him to observe very nasty, extremely disgusting things happening to innocent people during war and regular life, etc. etc. After months of this being forced on him, he kind of becomes a zombie type of person who gets nauseous anytime he even thinks of being evil.
Part 2 ends with him being set free back in to the real world. As you can probably guess, part 3 starts with him heading back home to return to normal life (about 3 years after he went to jail). He finds that things have changed, some of his old friends are gone, his parents have decided to move on from him and life isn't the same. He winds up running in to some people he had hurt in the past and this now makes him very sick feeling. He is involved in some fights that in the past he would have loved but now even the thought of doing bad makes him ill. This winds up taking a toll on him and he has a hard time adjusting to this life and thinks of taking his own. At this point he has some major choices to make and has a difficult time choosing which way to go. But I will leave that for you to figure out!
All in all I absolutely loved this book. The book came with about 250 pages of reviews and criticism from other authors. I have yet to read those but I will be starting that tonight. I didn't expect to care much about that part but the story was so amazing that I am now anxious to see what others thought and their interpretations. The narration from "Alex" is so original with his language he speaks and the thought process he goes through. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good story and a different outlook on whats important on a daily basis. There is a movie called A Clockwork Orange which I am very excited to see to compare but I have heard it is much different. We will see!
Update - I saw the movie and I really did not like it. The book is FAR better. The movie was too creepy and weird.