@TheMadPirate @jesu @kasdeya @kitsunecafe @lispi314 Reality is weird; fiction is a person conveying ideas. Not in the preachy sense, not a moral proscription, but A Clockwork Orange is a guy working out some ideas about the nature of free will (and the part that Kubrick left on the floor, destruction as a petty/juvenile activity that people grow out of, even if they live in a shitty society), Catch-22 is about the absurdity of war, and The Crying of Lot 49 is Pynchon trying to make you watch him jack off. (I hear Gravity's Rainbow is better but I liked only one page of Lot 49 and I don't wanna comb through to find it but it's the conversation in the bar.)

I had a conversation with @jesu and he mentioned that Kubrick's movies were generally better than the books he used and I immediately thought of "The Shining" and said that anyone that can turn a Stephen King novel into something good is clearly a genius, but I will say that A Clockwork Orange is an exception. There's no way to really do a 1:1 translation of 250 pages of words into 2 hours of people running around talking so it's not really that Kubrick failed at anything (it was still a really good movie) but it's really hard to touch Burgess.