Sitting in a coffee shop in the basement of a bookstore in northwest Washington, my friend flipped around her phone screen on the count of three.  It read: “Erudite.  Abnegation.”

We looked at each other, and a smile crept across my face.  Slowly I set my phone down on the table and slid it over to her.  Her face lit up and we both began laughing as she saw the message written on mine:

The main reason for our breakfast meeting was discussing Veronica Roth’s book “Divergent.  In that world, people belong to one of five factions: Abnegation, Erudite, Amity, Dauntless or Candor.  Props to Roth for making the names of the factions describe the basic idea of each one.

The exercise my friend and I did was to write down which one we would pick for each other, and then also predict what the other person was going to say.  So if you were at Politics & Prose a few weeks ago and saw two people WAY too excited about showing each other their phones, it’s because we both gave the exact same answer about me (we picked a primary and secondary faction).

We initially slightly disagreed on my top choice for her, but after I explained my reasoning, she was on board.  The lesson here is that close friends are cool to have.  They get you.  She also pointed out a few specific things she flagged in the text, and of course one of them was one of just three things I had highlighted to that point:

“My father used to say that sometimes, the best way to help someone is just to be near them.”

Must have been the Abnegation trait in both of us that gravitated to that idea.

Kids grow up in one faction, but at a certain age take a test that’s supposed to identify where they really belong.  Then they choose.  The main character, Tris, starts in Abnegation but opts to join Dauntless.

Of course, it’s hard to singularly define humans, and as Tris discovers, the various factions have strayed from their original mission/definition.  Dauntless is supposed to be about “ordinary acts of bravery” and “the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.”

But Tris finds a faction led by people who push recklessness and doing whatever it takes — often at the expense of others — to get ahead.  She likes the way Dauntless is supposed to be, and while those around her may not care, she decides to not let the current state affect her behavior.

“No matter how badly the leaders have warped the Dauntless ideals, those ideals can still belong to me.”

In the course of her Dauntless training, Tris becomes kind of a badass, leading to one of my favorite lines from the book:

“The bullet hit him in the head.  I know because that’s where I aimed it.”

If that’s not confidence in what you’re doing, I don’t know what is.

I’ll leave out any potentially spoiling details for those who haven’t read and either plan to or see the forthcoming movie.

Now to finish the trilogy.

One more thought:  Can we find a way to say to skip seeing movie trailers if we PROMISE we plan to see the movie?  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve scrambled to change the channel in the past few weeks so I could avoid any possible spoiler before I finished the book.  Also, I’m apparently reading every book in which Shailene Woodley will later play the main character in the movie.

A few years ago, I declared a book the most entertaining I had read about suicide.  Today, I give you the funniest book I’ve read about cancer.

Don’t get me wrong, John Green’s “The Fault In Our Stars” is incredibly sad in some parts, but the main character, a teenage girl named Hazel, peppers in phrases and observations that cut beautifully through the cloud of seriousness and sadness that linger in her world.

At one point she is talking about how she has a scan coming up to see the progress of her cancer, but says she has nothing to gain by worrying about what it might find before it actually happens.

“And yet still I worried.  I liked being a person.  I wanted to keep at it.  Worry is yet another side effect of dying.”

Part of the story involves her favorite book, called An Imperial Affliction, which is also told by a girl with cancer and which abruptly ends.  Like most of us when we finish a book, she wants to know what happens later to everyone involved, including the girl’s hamster.

She shares the book with her boyfriend, a fellow teen cancer patient, which leads to him saying something that made me laugh probably more than most people.

“‘I have been wanting to call you on a nearly minutely basis, but I have been waiting until I could form a coherent thought in re An Imperial Afflicion.'” (He said ‘in re.’  He really did.  That boy.)”

Why is that extra funny to me?  Because I have a friend who says, out loud, “re” in conversation.  It goes something like, “Oh hey, re what you emailed me about this morning…”  It is never not entertaining.

There’s a part later where her team of doctors is meeting to talk about the direction of her care.  The main doctor asks how they should proceed.

“And then she just looked at me, like she was waiting for an answer. ‘Um,’ I said, ‘I feel like I am not the most qualified person in the room to answer that question?'”

Out of the heavy, Hazel brings the levity.  But again, there is a lot that speaks to how we process people with cancer, especially when it comes to kids.  One of the things Hazel is very concerned about is not being seen as A KID WITH CANCER.  She does not want that to define her.

At one point, she is looking at the Facebook-like profile of her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, who died from cancer.  The girl’s wall is filled with posts you absolutely would expect, saying how much she’ll be missed and how heroically she fought.

“She seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like me, which made me worry that when I died they’d have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I’d ever done was Have Cancer.”

Her boyfriend, Augustus, was a star basketball player before cancer took one of his legs.  He became less of a fan of basketball, and after a comment about how in heaven he could play as much as he wanted, Hazel imagined his reaction.

“If I am playing basketball in heaven, does that imply a physical location of a heaven containing basketballs?  Who makes the basketballs in question?  Are there less fortunate souls in heaven who work in a celestial basketball factory so that I can play?”

A great question.  And a really exceptional book.  Also, soon a movie:

On January 1, 2012, my friend Felecia sent me a text message.

It wasn’t “Happy New Year!!!” like several others that day, but rather a very specific instruction: “Read ‘Lush Life’ by Richard Price!”

I keep a .txt file on my computer with the names of books I want to check out, either because they were recommended by friends or just something I happened to come across that looked interesting.  When I don’t have a specific next read in mind, I go to the list and pick one.

Two years after Felecia’s message, I can delete “Lush Life” from the list.

At first much of the dialogue made me feel very un-cool, whether it was the plethora of copspeak or teenage kids from the projects in New York.  After a while though, I really appreciated how immersive and distinctive it made the story, which follows the run-up to a random murder and what happens to all of the parties involved afterward.

Example:

“What the fuck is a dolgier?”
“A dolgier? A do-anything soldier.”

I’m going to start dropping “dolgier” into conversations now.  Get ready.

Price does an amazing job of taking the reader through the experiences of the shooter, a key witness, and especially the detectives trying to solve the case.  It’s not a murder mystery since you know up front who did it, but rather an exploration of how people handle stress, the pressure/fallout of making a name for themselves, and how “doing the right thing” can mean different things to different people involved and at different times.

It’s impressive how he jumps from one person to the next as the story unfolds, almost as if he’s listening when you’re thinking, “I wonder how the investigation is going,” and then flips a switch to take you there.  He also brings up a lot of social issues, especially those of class/racial disparities and how those affect the investigation and how each of the major players interacts not only with each other, but with the city.  Highly recommend this one.