Who would have guessed that the hyper-smart Susan Sontag, whom John Updike once described as our camp follower of the French avant garde, kept journals in which she set down unfamiliar words she came across in her reading?--"persiflage," for one, and "integument." The author of an in-progress biography of her reveals this detail here. I'd love to know what other words she was unsure of. It would be a tremendous resource for teens preparing for the SAT.
I just walked over to the book shelf and took down a battered Modern Library paperback of William Faulkner's Light in August. Sure enough, the inside of the back cover and the blank page facing it are filled with the definitions of words I came across while reading the novel for a college class in the 1970s. I couldn't make much of the book, but I was too dutiful a student not to turn the pages, so had decided, what the hell, I will at least make my vocabulary more Faulknerian. Here are the words, together with their definitions--only thing I know about the source for them is that it was not an online dictionary.
avatar: one regarded as the incarnation or embodiment of some known model
irascible: prone to outbursts of temper
immanent: existing within; inherent
augur: a seer or prophet; soothsayer
mendacity: the quality or state of being a liar
meretricious: pertaining to or resembling a prostitute
importunate: stubbornly or unreasonably persistent
veracity: habitual adherence to truth
redolent: having or emitting fragrance
ratiocination: to reason logically and methodically
soporific: tending to induce sleep
purlieu: an outlying or neighboring area
incipient: just beginning to exist or appear
spurious: lacking validity; false; counterfeit
visceral: intensely emotional
perspicuous: easy to understand; lucid
putrefaction: the decomposition of organic matter
inscrutable: not able to be fathomed or understood
apotheosis: deification
catafalque: what a coffin sits on
abrogate: to abolish; annul by authority
lassitude: a state of exhaustion; torpor; lethargy
paramour: a lover, esp adulterous lover
If you know nothing of Light in August, I bet you wouldn't guess from the above that it's about poor whites in Mississippi.