You know you’re a geek when, well, first of all, you’re reading a book called Perl Best Practices. However, you know you’re more of a geek when you get excited that the author advocates a coding style that matches yours (i.e., spaces instead of tabs, 4-space indents, and starting brackets on the the same line as the construct that controls the block). Even worse, though, is when you can’t wait to get to work tomorrow to try out a few new vi configuration options described by the author to help your lines break more sanely.

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	The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. & E.B. White Not wanting to contribute to the ever-declining state of grammar, spelling, and general writing quality on the internet, I thought this book would be a nice addition to my collection.
	Principles of Statistics by M.G. Bulmer I managed to make it through college without taking a true statistics course and still ended up with a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science. I ordered this page-turner to fill in a few holes.
	Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell Ms. Vowell provided the voice of Violet in The Incredibles and had a segment on the DVD extras showing off her history-geekiness. Seeing that piqued my interest enough that I bought this when it showed up in my Amazon recommendations.
	Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling I’ve read the rest, so I had to get this one.
	Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi I’ve been reading Mr. Scalzi’s blog for a while now, so when I saw a recent post about how the print run of this book was limited and that 10% of the cover price goes to the Child’s Play charity, I used an Amazon gift certificate I had sitting around to buy this book. My book is #526 of the 1500 numbered copies, all of which have been autographed by the author.
	Accelerando by Charles Stross In another of John Scalzi’s blog posts, The Myth of the Science Fiction Monoculture, he says, “I think [Accelerando] is just a tremendous science fiction novel, full of the things that make you go hmmm, science fictionally speaking. They might as well just announce Charlie’s Hugo nomination for it so the rest of us can go about our lives.” Since my aforementioned gift certificate had a bit left on it after Agent to the Stars, I added Accelerando to my order.

I may have to go back to riding the train to work to find the time to finish these in a reasonable amount of time.

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People look at me incredulously when they mention Harry Potter and I tell them that I’ve never read any of the books. “You haven’t? Oh, you must! You’d love them,” they say. And, the thing is, I’m sure I would really enjoy them. Why, then, haven’t I read them? I hadn’t given it much thought until I recently saw that the new book in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the #1 Top Seller on Amazon.com, more than six months before its release.

Obviously, people like Harry Potter. People really like Harry Potter. That, I think, is precisely what has been keeping me from reading the books. The snobbish side of me holds onto an inverse relationship between popularity and quality. It seems totally illogical when I actually think about it, but it’s a feeling that’s hard to shake. Something must be good if so many people like it, it would seem.

I think a part of the feeling stems from a sort of elitism I hadn’t realized I had picked up during my years of higher education: I have an advanced degree—of course I have better taste in books/music/movies than the unwashed masses. They don’t know any better. It kind of makes me ill realizing that I may have been thinking like that. Recognizing it is the first step, though, right?

I’m not going to take all the blame. A good portion of mass media and pop culture is so heavily marketed that quality seems to rarely even enter the picture. The lowest common denominator brings in the biggest amount of bucks. The result is a lot of media that mildly entertains a great number of people. But why be only mildly entertained by something many people are reading or listening to, when you can really enjoy something that is of higher quality but lacks the marketing budget of a Top Seller? Thankfully, it’s getting easier than ever to find these high-quality, less popular works with personalized recommendation features found on a growing number of websites.

Of course, there always is the possibility that something is wildly popular solely on its own merits. From all I’ve heard, the Harry Potter series is one such beast. I think it’s time to put my snobbishness aside and finally see what all of the hoopla is about.

I’m a computer programmer and therefore spend a good deal of my time working with pretty technical stuff. To put my brain in a slightly different gear, I decided to try and learn a new language. I took four years of Spanish in middle and high school, so, though I am by no means fluent in that, I decided to go in a little different direction and see how I’d do with Swedish. While it may not be the most useful language to learn, my great-grandparents were from Sweden and my grandfather can speak it a bit; it seemed like a good way to get in touch with my roots.

My first course of action was to head over to Amazon.com to see which books looked promising. In addition to a Swedish-English dictionary and a Swedish grammar guide, I purchased Teach Yourself Swedish by Vera Croghan. The book and its accompanying CDs follow a Swedish-speaking English family on their trip to Sweden to visit the family of an exchange student they had housed in England.

Each chapter starts off with a dialog that is both printed in the book and found on the CDs. Following that is a mini-glossary of all of the new Swedish words that were in the passage. Several other dialogs and definition lists are found throughout each chapter, but not all are recorded on the CDs. In addition to the dialogs, each chapter has a grammar section. For example, the first chapter handles singular nouns, personal pronouns, basic sentence structure and the present tense of common verbs. Later chapters introduce plural forms of nouns, past tense of verbs, questions, and so on. Every chapter ends with a passage about some cultural aspect to Sweden written in Swedish.

The audio CDs that accompany the book are what I find to be the most helpful part of the package. I copied them on to my iPod and listen to them while reading along in the text during my morning train commutes. Doing so has given me a much better handle on the sounds of spoken Swedish, such that I can listen to Sverige Radio and pick out some of the words that I know and get a general gist of the conversations. I still need to spend some time with the grammar portions, however, since I can’t yet sit down and write much in Swedish without sounding like a six-year-old.

Teach Yourself Swedish has definitely given me a nice start towards my goal of speaking fluent Swedish. With the addition of some other reference materials and just reading and listening to Swedish media, it’s just a matter of time until I can go pick up a new Volvo in Göteborg.