A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

This book was one of the hardest books I've ever read, and trust me, I've read the Iliad and the Odyssey. That doesn't mean that the book is bad, it's just that it's hard to really understand what's going on when you keep having to look to the back of the book for translations of words (which usually weren't there.) Over all, I would only recommend this book to people who have a lot of experience with literature (or if you speak the made up language of "Nadsat"). I would not attempt to read this book if you have a really hard time reading books such as the Odyssey or Dante's Inferno. Anyway, there was one thing that i noticed in the book that got me thinking. I noticed that there were 3 parts to the book, each with 7 chapters. This means that there is a total of 21 chapters. Thinking that this was weird, I went to research the symbolism online and I found out that Burgess did this to represent the 21 years it takes to get to maturity, which makes sense because in the 21st chapter, Alex, the main character, sees the error of his ways and resolves to turn his life around. I also learned that before 1986, the 21st chapter of A Clockwork Orange was emitted from the book. I thought that that was strange because this is a very famous book and the publishers took out the real ending to the book and left us with a compleatly different ending. I thought that that was just wrong.