Words of Week 12

Quintessential: Most typically representative of a quality, state, etc; perfect
Feasible: Capable of being done, effected, or accomplished
Vitiate: To impair the quality of; make faulty; spoil
Omnibenevolent: All-loving, or infinitely good
Svelte: Slender, especially gracefully slender in figure
Renowned: Celebrated; famous.
Antepenultimate: Third from the end
Anthropogenic: Caused or produced by humans

Charms in The Glass Palace

The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh, 512 pages

"How do you fight an enemy who fights from neither enmity nor anger, but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?"

"If you are strong enough to to face enemy bullets, you should be strong enough to hear them out."

"You want the pain to be simple, straightforward -- you don't want it to ambush you in these roundabout ways each morning, when you're getting up to do something else -- brush your teeth or eat your breakfast..."

"[I]f there was any tenet on which he'd wanted to build his life , it was that of never giving in to self-pity."

"This was what happiness was [--] your mind transformed into your body, your body instinct with the joy in your mind; this sensation of reality having met its end."

Charms in Divergent

Divergent by Veronica Roth, 487 pages (Divergent #1)

"[T]hose who want power and get it live in terror of losing it."

"We believe that preparation eradicated cowardice, which we define as the failure to act in the midst of fear."

"[P]oliteness is deception in pretty packaging"

"I like to think I'm helping them by hating them [...] I'm reminding them that they aren't God's gift to humankind."

"A brave man acknowledges the strength of others."

"Human reason can excuse any evil; that is why it's so important that we don't rely on it."

"I believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another."

"That is death -- shifting from 'is' to 'was.'"

"I am someone who does not let inconsequential things like boys and near-death experiences stop her."

"I traded cowardice for cruelty; I traded weakness for ferocity."

--
This book is 486 pages, I finished it in two days. It's very fluid. However, it's very similar to The Hunger Games. Dystopian society, brave girl who is different than all others, a revolution, her romantic interest at some point gets injected with a special serum so that he doesn't know who she is and tries to kill her (much like Peeta in Mockingjay)...But it's a good book, it's intense and entertaining.