30. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (1962)
"'What's it going to be then, eh?'" A major theme in A Clockwork Orange is that of youth and the immaturity of youth. Typical teenage slang is perverted and heightened almost to the point of incomprehensibility, almost into another language entirely. The old ultraviolence undertaken by Alex and his droogs is the most extreme example of the decline of humanity from one generation to the next, but the first sentence of the novella - repeated frequently after the first instance - opens a world of possibilities, good or bad, for the future.