Is it bad to say you hate a book that's considered a classic? Because I hated this book. 
 The nadsat talk was so distracting. I usually really dislike books that are written with a dialect, and A Clockwork Orange is no different. I spent more time trying to figure out what a sentence said than absorbing the bigger picture - the story. I might have come out of this with a much different feeling had the book been written in the third-person and only having dialogue between characters in this slang. 
 But I also didn't really care for the story line either. I hate violence, but I can deal with it in a book as long as there's a point. I couldn't find the point no matter how hard I tried. It was violence for violence's sake, which lacks so much substance and depth. I also felt like the book was poorly written. I jumped through scenes so quickly, and there was very little in the way of "setting the stage." There's very little description - of characters, the towns and villages, and everything else. 
 Alex is also incredibly dumb. He's that kid from high school that I just can't stand because he just doesn't "get it." The whole "o my brothers" thing and the whining and the "humble narrator" was just obnoxious to me. 
 I was also let down by the final chapter. The back of the book describes it as "controversial," and the girl at Barnes & Noble who waited on me at checkout said she loved it - the whole book, especially the final chapter. So I was expecting this to be a big thing. After part one I kept thinking, "My goodness, what could this last chapter be?!" Part of me was holding out a little bit of hope that the final chapter would somehow make me like this book. But absolutely not. That did not happen. It felt so anticlimactic - chalking everything up to teenage angst. Incredibly disappointing. 
 The only thing that gives this book any potential is the message: good and bad and a person's choice between the two, which is why I'm formally giving this book 1.5 stars. (But I'm rounding down because rounding up would be entirely too generous.) I feel like the message could have really helped this book, but Burgess fell flat in really exploring the psychology of that choice and having it play a larger, more definite role in the story.