I was late enough to the “Divergent” series that all three books were very much out by the time I started, meaning I was already quite aware that people disliked the third one.  I now completely understand why.

In a world with no “Hunger Games” maybe “Divergent” would have an easier time, but by comparison it’s hard to ignore the flaws.  What’s great about the plotting of the “Hunger Games” is the way the drumbeat of action builds as the series goes along, especially with the way we get taken back into the games so early in the second book.  I finished those needing to immediately jump into the next one.

With “Divergent,” the story gets really bogged down with setting us up for action, basically flipping the second book from the “Catching Fire” model to being mostly the lead-in for a tiny bit of action right at the end.

I have a bigger complaint with “Allegiant,” the final book in Veronica Roth’s series.  Main character Tris narrates the first two, but suddenly shares those duties in book three with Tobias.  And really, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.  I get why she did it in the end.  But the execution is annoying.  In many dual-narrator stories they alternate chapters and have distinct voices, making it almost unnecessary to even label who is doing the talking.  You just know.

That was not the case in “Allegiant.”  I can’t tell you the number of times I was seven pages into a chapter and the narrator said something that made me realize it was Tris when I thought it was Tobias (and vice-versa).  Part of the problem is that they spent so much time doing similar things in the first two books that mentioning things from the past didn’t differentiate who was talking at all.

My other issue with this story was the amount of time Roth spent building up a romantic jealousy angle in the beginning and then letting it fizzle away to nothing.  Given all the pages that involved people sitting in a room and talking, and all the hot-and-cold behavior of Tris and Tobias from one page to the next, it might have been interesting to have some dating drama in this story.

It wasn’t the train wreck I was expecting from the reviews I heard, but certainly not my favorite book or even close to my favorite in this series.

I will give Roth credit for making me laugh when Tobias goes to basically kidnap Tris’ brother Caleb, who is not a nice guy and makes poor decisions like trying to flee people who are a lot bigger than him.

Tobias ends up knocking down Caleb, sending him face-first into the floor.  The effects of this event are evident when Tobias drags Caleb outside and another guy sees them.

Zeke: “Why’s he bleeding?”
Tobias: “Because he’s an idiot.”
Zeke: “I didn’t know that idiocy caused people to start spontaneously bleeding from the nose.”

If only it did.

Go to download electronic copy of book: $19.99
See book available for shipping from same merchant: $14.99
Check their physical store for same book: $27.99

After taking all this in, I did end up doing the ebook version of Nate Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise,” though largely because I wanted to start reading without waiting for it to be shipped.

Silver progresses through a series of topics building a case for improving predictions and models by largely being as honest as possible with the process.  He highlights the need for good input data and especially in expressing results with degrees of confidence.  As he argues, it may get more headlines to give an emphatic yes/no kind of pick, but everyone is better served if you honestly say there’s an 85 percent yes/15 percent no chance of whatever happening.

He focuses one chapter on economists’ forecasts for Gross Domestic Product, those periodic releases of data on how the economy is doing.  So many of the picks come out as just a number, like 3 percent growth next quarter.  But Silver says those picks tend to have what is basically a 3.2 percent margin of error, meaning a 3 percent target could in reality turn out to be 6.2 percent or -0.2 percent, which is a pretty significant difference.

To get the best use of a GDP forecast, Silver argues that perhaps we should be reporting them with margins of error just as we do with political polls.

“Danger lurks, in the economy and elsewhere,” he writes, “when we discourage forecasters from making a full and explicit account of the risks inherent in the world around us.”

The most fascinating chapter of the book for me is about weather forecasting.  It’s no secret that people love to make fun of the profession, but perhaps because of my personal relationship with some meteorologists, I find myself being more of a defender.  Silver points out that weather forecasts have gotten steadily better every year, and have dramatically improved in the past 10 or so.

But he brings up one thing that will truly make me see forecasts differently, and that’s how various outlets will talk to you about the chance of rain.  Silver says a National Weather Service forecast of 20 percent chance of rain really does play out that often, while the Weather Channel will say 20 when it actually only rains 5 percent of that time.

Why?

“In fact, this is deliberate and is something the Weather Channel is will to admit to,” Silver writes.  “It has to do with their economic incentives.  People notice one type of mistake — the failure to predict rain — more than another kind, false alarms.  If it rains when it isn’t supposed to, they curse the weatherman for ruining their picnic, whereas an unexpectedly sunny day is taken as a serendipitous bonus.”

Silver also talks about the challenges and risks of judging forecasts that may be what he calls “self-defeating.”  That is, a forecast that end up affecting itself and thus not coming true.

“The most effective flu prediction might not be one that fails to come to fruition because it motivates people toward more healthful choices.”

And yet, how often do we see people throw up a prediction about something like flu season and say “SEE! SEE HOW WRONG YOU WERE!”  More need to talk about ranges of outcomes and think about why things turn out the way they do.

Another chapter on his baseball model, called PECOTA, made me laugh and drop into a deep baseball-less depression.  Silver really became first known for developing PECOTA, and among other things he used it to project how minor league players would perform.  He says in the book that his model was optimistic about future stars like Ian Kinsler and Matt Kemp.

“But have you ever heard of Joel Guzman?  Donald Murphy?  Yusemiro Petit?  Unless you are a baseball junkie, probably not.  PECOTA liked those players as well.”

Yes, Nate, I HAVE HEARD OF YUSEMIRO PETIT.  Granted, this book came out two years ago, but just last month I sat freezing in Nationals Park as the San Francisco Giants outlasted my beloved Nats 2-1 in an 18-inning game that was the longest in MLB postseason history.

Petit pitched six innings in relief for the Giants that night, allowing only one hit and earning the win as the Giants grabbed a commanding 2-0 lead in the best-of-five series.

I guess I can’t hold Silver responsible for the emotional effects of his forecast coming true.  This is a great book for those interesting in modeling, data or just thinking about how we talk about the world around us.

A few months ago, I asked my friend Brooke for a book recommendation.  She described her pick as: “Hunger games on steroids from the male perspective.  With bonus space colonization.”

That was all I needed to get into Pierce Brown’s “Red Rising.”  After reading, I might add meth to Brooke’s description.

The best comp I can give it is “Catching Fire,” the second book in the Hunger Games series.  The methodically building drumbeat of the plot makes it impossible to put down.  My only complaint is that I was under the impression the second book in this series was already out, but when I went to purchase it I discovered it won’t be released until January.  THANKS, BROOKE.

“Red Rising” follows a teenager named Darrow who is a superstar worker in a mining colony underground on Mars.  This universe has colonies on all the planets and moons governed by a master race of people, and a society delineated by colors.  The highest are the Golds, while Darrow and his Reds sit at the bottom.

Darrow is plugging along in life, aware that the system he lives under is pretty unfair, but not sure what exactly he can do to change anything.  His wife, Eo, is a fireplug of a young woman who wants nothing more than to upend the entire structure.  She pushes back when Darrow talks about how his father was hanged for his activities with no apparent gains for their people.

“Death isn’t empty like you say it is,” she says.  “Emptiness is life without freedom, Darrow.  Emptiness is living chained by fear, fear of loss, of death.  I say we break those chains.”

A series of spoilery things unfolds, legitimately making me angry as I read on the train and leading me to tweet to Brooke in all caps wondering how I was supposed make it through work without knowing what happened next:

@txtingmrdarcy I’ll have to settle for a day of suspense while my rage subsides
— Chris Hannas (@cjhannas) September 23, 2014

She questioned the wisdom of her selection:

@cjhannas I am trying to decide if this book was a good recommendation or a REALLY BAD IDEA.
— Brooke Shelby (@txtingmrdarcy) September 23, 2014

But it was a good choice.  The story of Darrow fighting back under an elaborate, yet believable plan so captured my attention I flagged only a handful of passages.  He has to immerse himself in a world of the Golds he has only partially gleaned before being in their midst, and face-to-face he confronts stark realities of how and why they rule.

“I hate them, but I hear them,” he says.

I cannot recommend this book enough.  And if you want to be on the early curve of pop culture, it’s already been picked up to be made into a movie.  What do you need in movies?  A cast.  If Hollywood is listening, Brooke and I are ready to take our jobs as expert casting directors:

@cjhannas That’s a good call. I pictured Sam Claflin as Darrow, Jena Malone as Mustang (i tend to go older, apparently) and…. Eo?
— Brooke Shelby (@txtingmrdarcy) October 15, 2014

@txtingmrdarcy Totally on board with Claflin. Let’s make the other kid Cassius. Samantha Barks (?) for Eo?! Liam for Fitchner?
— Chris Hannas (@cjhannas) October 15, 2014

We’ll have to wait and see who gets the real roles.  But for now, as of this moment you have 46 days to read this book before the next one comes out.  Get to work!

If you obsessively check here for new posts you’re about to think I’m going to skip eating and breathing this weekend in favor of reading.  Somehow I haven’t done a book post since mid-September, and combined with the fact that I have actually been reading, there are four I need to talk about.

Here we’re just going to worry about the first — Junot Diaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”

This is one of those books I’ve walked past or picked up in a bookstore roughly 2.8 billion times before I actually committed to reading it.

The story is a multi-generational tale from one family and multiple narrators.  Diaz does a really incredible job of differentiating their voices so that even with no labeling you would easily know who was talking.  Remember this when I get to the fourth book (the final in the Divergent series), which I think is equally as poor as “Oscar Wao” is good in this department.

For much of the story Oscar is the main focus.  He’s a nerdy, awkward kid who struggles to be “normal” in many social settings and yet outwardly maintains a sort of detached attitude about his results.  It’s as if in his failures he sees in retrospect he should not have expected success and adopts that as a memory instead of seeing that view as hindsight.

One of the other narrators, who at one point dates Oscar’s sister, Lola, describes one episode of Oscar’s charm:

“Oscar’s idea of a G was to talk about role-playing games!  How fucking crazy is that?  (My favorite was the day on the E bus when he informed some hot morena, If you were in my game I would give you an eighteen Charisma!)”

I most enjoyed being led along this story by Lola, who is a few years older than Oscar.  Diaz gives her a certain thoughtfulness that comes with having to grow up early and take care (in certain ways) of both her mother and brother.

She talks at one point about discovering her mother’s breast cancer, beginning that story with, “It’s never the changes we want that change everything.”

I think I would disagree with that slightly — I shy away from using that kind of absolute — but I think saying it’s rarely the changes we want that change everything is accurate.  Yes, there are a few cases in which a surprise is positively life changing, say a job offer out of the blue.  But most often it’s the negatives that blow up your world.

Lola isn’t on the same level of dorkdom as Oscar, but she’s studious and likes to read.  She describes part of her life in which she wanted to get away from all the responsibilities that had been thrown on her shoulders.

“All my favorite books from that period were about runaways.  “Watership Down,” “The Incredible Journey,” “My Side of the Mountain.”

This sentence made me wonder how many people reading this book are like me and have also read “Watership Down” and “My Side of the Mountain.”  We need a form of Google for this.

When I was a kid, my neighbors gave me “My Side of the Mountain” as a birthday gift.  It’s the kind of book that has a map in the front, the ones you study for a few minutes before getting to the text even though you know there’s no chance you’ll remember anything useful without learning the context.  The main character is living on his own in the woods (I think he sleeps inside a tree?) and has a pet falcon.  As a boy, that’s a pretty dope protagonist.

“Watership Down” was one of the required summer reading books for my 10th grade GT English class.  I thought it was going to be the most boring book in existence, but mainly because I didn’t know what the word “lapine” meant.  The reading list had a description of each title, and I read this one to my mom in a mock aristocratic tone, thinking that “lapine society” involved people with powdered wigs.  She let me finish, then informed me that lapine meant it was a story about rabbits.  It was fantastic.

Back to Oscar — I should never have put this book down in the bookstore.  It can be super depressing at times, but I think that makes you better appreciate the highs and the beauty elsewhere.  I also should have been less engrossed in the story and flagged more things.

I’ll close with this insight from Diaz, which I don’t think need any caveats:

“Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.”

It’s not strange to connect with the main character of a book, but feeling something in common with several of them is a little more rare.

Authors often bring you along for the ride by making you root for the protagonist, especially if they are narrating.  In “The Marriage Plot,” Jeffrey Eugenides gave me three people who had me nodding along with their experiences.

On a superficial level, he named the main female character Madeleine Hanna, which is both extremely close to the name of my niece and also highly distracting anytime he talks about her family and calls them the Hannas.

Madeleine begins the story as a student who is about to graduate from Brown University.  Through some flashbacks we learn about her earlier years at the school, including a night she goes to a party in her building and her friend Mitchell notices she keeps leaving.

“I figured since everyone was going to the party, the washers would be free,” she says.  “So I decided to do my laundry at the same time.”

This is brilliant thinking and I would 100 percent do the same.  Multitasking efficiency doesn’t stop for parties.

Mitchell, when asked to send in a picture for the freshmen directory decides he doesn’t want to submit one of himself.  Instead he flips open a book on Civil War history and cuts out the picture of a soldier.  Again, brilliant.

Mitchell is infatuated with Madeleine to the point that he thought to himself upon meeting her that they would one day be married.  Unfortunately for him, she’s a little more interested in a guy named Leonard.

Leonard is an interesting character who is both super smart and also struggles with depression.  On his good days, he makes witty observations and engages in deep intellectual conversations with ease.  One day Madeleine finds him at the library talking to a girl who works there about imagining life from the point of view of a fly.

“We move in slow motion to them,” he says.  “They can see the swatter coming from a million miles away.  The flies are like, ‘Wake me when the swatter gets close.'”

That’s the kind of random look at life I can really support.

Leonard and Madeleine meet during a seminar class that has a super obnoxious student named Thurston, which actually reminded me a lot of my own college experience.

During my first semester, I was in an English class with about 15 people, and only one other guy.  If you know me at all, it’s probably not surprising that I did a lot of listening to other people’s takes and not raising my hand every two seconds.  The other guy was the opposite.  He was the student who appeared to like hearing the sound of his own voice.  At the time, I actually was a little jealous of him and thought it would be nice to be more like him, always having something to add and commanding that attention.

There’s a quote from the book’s version of that kid that reminded me how much that view changed for me:

“But it’s just a question of whether you can use a discredited discourse — like, say reason — to explicate something as paradigmatically revolutionary as deconstruction,” Thurston says.

It’s the kind of statement that makes you want to punch your own self in the face for having listened.  Madeleine rolls her eyes.

Late in my college career I took a political science course and the same kid ended up in my class.  He was still doing the same thing — raising his hand constantly and spouting sentences like Thurston’s — but my reaction was different.  I had realized much more how comfortable I was with my way of academic life (and life in general) and how our different personalities fit in to the whole fabric of the experience.  Most of all, I realized how important it was to be genuine and not forcing bullshit to try to impress people who are rolling their eyes at you.

Madeleine makes her own discoveries about herself and what she sees in the mirror.  At one point she and Leonard break up, leaving her feeling rejected.  She looks at herself and sees all these specific imperfections.

“Madeleine knew that this self-appraisal might not be accurate.  A bruised ego reflected its own image.”

I thought that was one of the more striking notes in the book.  Think about all the times you fail — big and small — or are rejected in some way.  It’s so easy to focus inwardly and go looking for those faults, and then inflate them.  But it’s that bruised ego talking, showing itself to you in a way that is not truly you.

Overall, this is in many parts a thoroughly depressing story, and for all the interesting and funny times the characters have, they can be ones from which you want to turn away.  But not every story is sunshine and lollipops, and this is one I would still recommend.

I don’t remember much from the 1980s.  That’s the kind of statement people jokingly say about the ’70s with the implication that drugs were involved.  For me, the lack of recollection had to do with being a small human.

But I do remember one key invention from that era: the Nintendo Entertainment System.  I can’t begin to imagine the number of hours my siblings and I spent playing games like Bases Loaded, Gauntlet 2 and Super Mario 3.

Put that system in the hands of young people today, and they basically have no idea what’s happening, like 16-year-old Tori in the video below:

“I mean, I’ve played with like a PlayStation 2,” she says, “but that’s as old as it gets for me.”

That lack of knowledge would significantly hamper these kids if they lived in the world of Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One.”

The story takes place in the 2040s and follows as people to unravel a game left behind by James Halliday, the creator of a massive online world.  He announces his entire wealth will go to the person who wins the game that involves finding three keys and making it through their respective gates.

Halliday is obsessed with the 1980s, the decade in which he was a teenager, so the game involves numerous references to the video games and other culture from that decade.  People trying to win his game play every game he did and watch every ’80s movie in search of the slightest hint.  The main character in the story is a teenager named Wade, who attends high school in the massive virtual world and gains worldwide noteriety as the finder of the first key.

I won’t say any more about the plot, because you should just go read this highly engrossing story.  But I will mention two things that made me laugh.

Within the virtual school, everyone has an avatar just like many of us do for various online things now.

“The school’s strictly enforced dress code required that all student avatars be human, and of the same gender and age as the student.  No giant two-headed hermaphrodite demon unicorn avatars were allowed.  Not on school grounds, anyway.”

Where is this school located, Boringtown?  Imagine how much more fun school would be if all of your classmates were represented by ridiculous characters!

Outside of school, Wade goes by the name Parzival.  Unfortunately, as mentioned, the school is a no-fun zone in which he has to be himself.

“Students weren’t allowed to use their avatar names while they were at school.  This was to prevent teachers from having to say ridiculous things like “Pimp_Grease, please pay attention!”

Again, think how great it would be if this policy did not exist.  I would attend class solely for the purpose of hearing a teacher call on Pimp_Grease to explain the significance of the Magna Carta.

This book has so many more good references, so many in fact that I didn’t even stop to flag them as I blew through Parzival’s quest to try to win the game.  You will enjoy it, and then want to immediately go play something.

For a while I’ve been meaning to email myself a list of Steinbeck books I’ve read/need to read so that when I’m at a bookstore I actually know which ones to acquire in my quest to get through them all.

After reading “Sweet Thursday,” I finally compiled the list and have completed 11 of them with 17 to go.  Though I’ve read the longest ones already, so I consider myself roughly halfway there.

The unread Steinbeck section of my bookshelf

Part of the reason for making the list is that I want to read the rest more or less in order, because in this case, “Sweet Thursday” takes place in the same place as “Cannery Row.”  It’s not necessary to read “Cannery Row” first, but there are a few references that make more sense if you have.

Oddly enough, I meant to grab a different unread Steinbeck from the stack, but I’m glad I ended up reading this one because it’s actually one of my favorite of his I’ve read in a while.  This town is populated with a lot of charming people who have a ton of faults, but just try so hard at life that you can’t help but to root for them or at least laugh at them with empathy.

I’m sure I’ve touched on this in every Steinbeck post before, but if you wanted an epic biography for yourself, he’s the guy you would want following you around.  His descriptions are so unique.

There’s a character named Doc, the town’s smart guy who helps everyone and often ends up getting hurt when their best-laid plans to repay him spectacularly blow up.  One day he’s out in the countryside and meets a stranger:

“This one was a big, bearded stranger with the lively, innocent eyes of a healthy baby,” Steinbeck writes.  “He wore ragged overalls and a blue shirt washed nearly white, and he was barefooted.  The straw hat on his head had two large holes cut in the brim, proof that it had once been the property of a horse.”

Every element of that is nothing short of epic. In another scene, Doc ends up at a diner in Monterey, which is run by a guy named Sonny Boy.  Steinbeck paints him as the precursor to the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World.”

“Sonny Boy can say ‘good evening’ and make it sound like an international plot.”

Sometimes the context of a great line is not important at all.  Like this, which needs to be on a t-shirt:

“There is nothing reassuring about the smile of a tiger.”

Late in the story, the manager of the brothel across the street is getting one of her girls, Suzy, ready for a date she has set up with Doc, and drops this pearl of wisdom that applies pretty much to all humans:

“You know, Suzy, they ain’t no way in the world to get in trouble by keeping your mouth shut,” she says.  “You look back at every mess you ever got in and you’ll find your tongue started it.”

If tigers ever start talking, we’re going to have a serious problem.

Paul Auster has a way of slowly and methodically sucking you into his novels.  “Oracle Night” is certainly one of those books.

The main character is an author who in the course of the story writes part of a book and a treatment for a screenplay.  Auster tells not only the author’s story, but also gives you these others within it.

Those other stories?  They’re kind of amazing too.  The portion of a book follows a guy who nearly gets killed while walking on the street, takes that as a breaking point from his old life, keeps walking and boards a plane to a new city to start over.  It’s a legitimate page-turner and my only disappointment with “Oracle Night” is that I don’t get to know what happens to him.

The film idea is equally great.  The author is asked to develop a script for a “War of the Worlds” movie, and since there is already a straight adaptation, he decides to take it in a new direction.  His idea partly involves people in the future who get to take one ride in a time machine to 200 years in the past in order to observe their ancestors.

You go at age 20, and the author writes that the purpose is to teach you humility and compassion for other people.

“The traveler will understand that he has come from an immense cauldron of contradictions and that among his antecedents are beggars and foold, saints and heroes, cripples and beauties, gentle souls and violent criminals, altruists and thieves.”

I would absolutely watch this movie, and support its implementation in real life.  If you happen to have a time machine, please get this going.

This book had me so into the story I didn’t stop to note many things along the way, but there’s one more bit that caught me attention.  The author’s wife is telling him about a dream in which they ended up in a locked room together.  He asks if she knew what happened to them and she says that’s when she woke up.

“People can’t die in their dreams, you know,” she says.  “Even if the door was locked, something would have happened to get us out.  That’s how it works.  As long as you’re dreaming, there’s always a way out.”

That last line belongs on t-shirts and Pinterest.

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.