Let’s viddy Alex again, oh, my droogies

Look a bit online and you’re apt to find the “Best 100 First Lines from Novels,” as put out by the American Book Review. It’s an interesting list.

Yet to my tastes, there is one opening line that is distinctly missing. Here is that particular line:

“There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim and we sat in the Korova milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.”

It is, of course, from Anthony Burgess ’ 1962 novel “A Clockwork Orange,” which Stanley Kubrick adapted brilliantly in 1971.

The rest of the opening graph goes like this: “The Korova Milk Bar sold milkplus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence. Our pockets were full of money so there was no need on that score, but, as they say, money isn’t everything.”