Wednesdays with Words (Penrod)

 I just started reading Penrod by Booth Tarkington to my kids and have been greatly challenged in my reading abilities. Tarkington likes to use big words and not just one here or there, but as many as he can in a sentence. Here was my challenge sentence that I read last night.

Any flavour of sweetness remained in the nature of Penrod Schofield after the dismal trials of the school-week just past, that problematic, infinitesimal remnant was made pungent acid by the imminence of his destiny to form a prominent feature of the spectacle, and to declaim the loathsome, sentiments of a character named upon the programme the Child Sir Lancelot. 

 I survived that sentence only to run into this one:

There was a long soliloquy upon the fence, a plaintive monologue without words: the boy's thoughts were adjectives, but they were expressed by a running film of pictures in his mind's eye, morbidly prophetic of the hideosities before him. 

Well, if I survive reading this aloud we should have an increased and rich vocabulary!!