Book Club

I'm reading A Clockwork Orange. I've never seen the movie, but I did once read a MAD Magazine satire of it, so I have a very basic understanding of the plot going in. I picked the book up a few weeks ago, mainly because Borders was doing a deal where you could buy three select books and get one free.

I think this book has just about reached "classic" status. Burgess has been praised for his use of language in the book, and of course, there was a very popular movie based on it. Because of all this, I'm a little embarassed about reading it. It's not that I'm too cool to read popular fiction, but that the themes strike me as the type of thing you read in high school. If I had read the book then, I think I would have been a bit more drawn into what Burgess is saying about good and evil. At this point in my life, however, these are familiar ideas.

I guess that's why it seemed odd that the stranger sitting at the table across from mine at lunch today would ask me how I liked it. He probably expected or wanted me to tell him how great I thought it was. It is a good book, so far, even if it's not sparking any new thoughts for me, but Jesus, what am I, in your fucking book club? Like I said: the book is practically a classic. Casually asking a stranger who is 36 goddam pages in what they think of it is like trying to strike up a conversation by saying, "So, what do you think of the color blue?"

The next time I plan to read something like this in public, I'm first going to read the Cliff Notes in private. That way, when someone asks me what I think of it, I can launch into an intellectual diatribe about the symobolic nature of the author's use of semi-colons.