Some people talk to themselves, others talk to their dog or cat, but in Nick Hornby’s “Slam,” the main character talks to a Tony Hawk poster.

It’s a storytelling quirk that becomes less and less necessary to move the plot as the book goes along, but every time Sam talks to TH (as he calls him for sake of not having to write it out over and over) I couldn’t help but laugh.  He doesn’t hear words he would imagine coming from TH, but rather quotes from the autobiography that skating-obsessed Sam has read a thousand times.

Take, for example, when he breaks up with his girlfriend and asks TH if he did something wrong by ending things:

“‘If something in my life didn’t revolve around skating, then I had a hard time figuring it out,’ said T.H.  He was talking about Sandy again, his first real girlfriend, but it might have been his way of saying, ‘How the hell do I know?  I’m only a skater.’  Or even, ‘I’m only a poster.'”

That’s the beauty of the Sam-TH relationship.  It’s like thinking about Stewie on Family Guy and why sometimes the adults can understand what he’s saying and sometimes they can’t.  When it’s convenient for Sam (TH agrees with him) then he totally buys in, but at other times he’s very quick to point out the lunacy of the whole thing.

Sam needs all this advice from TH because he’s prone to getting himself into trouble, which isn’t all that unexpected since he’s 16.  Sure that the ex-girlfriend, Alicia, is pregnant, he runs off instead of actually hearing the news in a plan that unravels spectacularly from the beginning.  When he comes back, he vows to be smarter, but knows that’s easier said than done.

“It’s not enough, though, just to decide not to be stupid.  Otherwise, why don’t we decide to be really clever — clever enough to invent something like the iPod and make a lot of money?”

Later Sam and Alicia have an argument in which she accuses him of thinking he has a future for himself, while she is destined for a dead-end life.  He responds by bringing up her stated aspiration of being a model — something she told him in a flirty manner when they first met to gauge his interest.  Naturally, that only made things worse for Sam, who realized his error in mixing a good moment with this one.

“You should never drag stuff out of a nice conversation and chuck it back in the middle of a nasty one.  Instead of one good memory and one bad memory, you’re left with two shitty ones.”

Hornby has been one of my favorite authors for a while, and while this is far from my favorite book of his, he did toss in something I’m sure was just for me:

“I didn’t call Alicia’s dad Mr. Burns anymore.  I called him Robert, which was better, because every time I said Mr. Burns, I thought of an ancient bald bloke who owned the Springfield nuclear reactor.”

I want a Milhouse reference in the next book, Nick.

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.