Geeks are a diverse lot, so making generalizations is always tricky, but I think maybe it’s safe to say that one attribute that unifies geeks is a love of books. Maybe not all the same books -- maybe one guy collects tons of comic books and someone else likes 18th-century French poetry and that girl over there, she’s into contemporary murder mysteries and yet another reader simply must own every science fiction novel ever published in Eastern Europe. Bibliophiles are by definition geeks, and maybe booklovers in ancient times were the original geeks. And part of what geekiness is today is a desire to look at the world from all sorts of angles, news ones as well as the tried-and-true, and what better way to do that than with books?
Me, my library was somewhat diminished by a poverty-induced selloff a few years back -- thank god for NYC’s Strand Bookstore and its bookbuying desk; I actually raised the rent one lean month by hauling in boxes and boxes of books. But it’s growing again, slowly, and the composition, subjectwise, hasn’t really changed much: lots of science (biology, psychology, physics), mythology (of the comparative type, mostly), history (a lot of fundamental-interconnectedness-of-all-things stuff), science fiction and fantasy, classics, a fair selection of children’s books (ones with aspects of the fantastic). Smatterings of all sorts of other things. I have a litmus test for new acquaintances visiting my apartment for the first time: the ones who say, “Wow, have you read all these books?” are the ones who might remain acquaintances but are unlikely to pass into the realm of “friend”; the ones who immediately go to the shelves, grunting approvingly while noting the spines, and ask to borrow a couple are the keepers.
