We've got your back. With the Tough-O-Meter, you'll know whether to bring extra layers or Swiss army knives as you summit the literary mountain. (10 = Toughest)
(6) Tree Line
Unlike Anthony Burgess's better-known novel A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed isn't full of strange futuristic slang and lingo. Instead, Burgess flexes some powerful proper-English muscles here, and we guarantee that the book will have you reaching for your pocket dictionary. "Anabasis," "bathycolpian," "epicene," "eleemosynary," "exophagy," and "tigrine" are just some of the ten-dollar tickets you'll encounter, and Burgess makes use of a whole host of other words that are slightly more common, but still unlikely to turn up in everyday speech.
Apart from the difficulties of its vocabulary, the subject matter of The Wanting Seed can make the novel pretty tough going too. Its early chapters are full of nasty homophobia, xenophobia, racism, and sexism to boot, and it's really hard to tell whether those prejudices belong to the characters, or the novel itself. One thing's for sure: this is the kind of satire that likes to raise its readers' hackles!