Book two of the “Divergent” series: done.  Well, I finished “Insurgent” a month ago, but let’s use my blogging procrastination for some sort of good.

In early June, Nationals outfielder Bryce Harper was still healing from a thumb injury that cost him much of the first half of the season.  He returned to the lineup Monday and caused some stirs when he suggested he should be playing center field instead of manning his former home in left.

This became one of those annoying sports “debates” that bounced around talk radio and among people who take this kind of thing way too seriously.  I may have unfollowed a few people on Twitter.

I’m going to use his honest statement to quickly point out that he is Divergent.  Anyone who watches Bryce play for two seconds can see that he has a whole lot of Dauntless pulsing through his veins.  The guy is fearless in the way he throws his body around the field.  Ask him a question, and the Candor part of him comes out.

As with Tris in the books, having multiple faction aptitudes can be a great thing.  In “Insurgent,” she is forced to undergo interrogation under a truth serum at the Candor headquarters.  She admits in front of her Dauntless brethren that she killed one of their friends, a piece of information that causes huge rifts with some of the people with which she used to be the closest.

“The Candor sing the praises of the truth, but they never tell you how much it costs,” she says.

We all appreciate truth and having people be straightforward with us, but there are times where we say completely true, completely honest things that cause nothing but problems.  In time, these things often work themselves out (like the Nats winning every game since Harper’s return), but the intermediary steps can be tough.

Tris wants to move on from shooting her friend Will both because it has messed with her former confidence in her abilities and because she doesn’t like being a social outcast.  She does all she can, including basically deciding to sacrifice herself for the sake of everyone in her faction.  In the end, even Will’s girlfriend, Tris’s good friend Christina, understands and forgives her.

There’s still one book left in this series, and I’m wary of what is next.  Coming into “Insurgent,” my friend and I who are reading them together wondered where the story could go after the first book and were generally pleased with how it went.  But we’ve also heard that the third book is a total letdown, so it’s hard to be super enthusiastic about it.

This is why I usually try to avoid hearing/reading about either a book or movie I’m going to check out for myself.

At one point during “Insurgent,” Tris and the leader of her former faction are at Amity headquarters where they see a water filtration machine at work.

“Both us of watch the purification happen,” she says, “and I wonder if he is thinking what I am: that it would be nice if life worked this way, stripping the dirt from our lives and sending us out into the world clean.  But some dirt is destined to linger.”

As much as I want to go into the third book fresh, there is that bit of dirt that’s going to make me start looking for points at which I think the story is about to go into disappointing territory.  Maybe I’ll just choose to believe that everyone was purposely lying to me and I’ll be pleasantly surprised.