You don’t start a blog called Reading is my Superpower without have a strong geek contingent in your DNA strands. So I was delighted to see that my dear friend and geek goddess RPG editrix Amanda Valentine was one of the masterminds behind Speak Out With Your Geek Out, an internet confab to celebrate all things uncelebrated except by people who get why dragons make books better.

I hid my geek for a long time because I moved in a world where I didn’t know any. I couldn’t get book recommendations, much less have a conversation about them. So I slaked my desires for the supernatural, paranormal, fantastic, and epic by reading Stephen King over and over and over.

And then I made a friend who recommended Assassin’s Apprentice, and the abovementioned Amanda Valentine told me about a little book called Game of Thrones, and my brother discovered The Dark Tower. And I was off!

Now I fly my geek flag high and proudly. I happily read books my husband calls “vampires in space.” I’ve gotten to interview awesome fantasy authors like Peter V. Brett and Jeffrey Overstreet. My geek aspirations were fully realized when I was hired to contribute a section to the Smallville High School Yearbook.

I love books where I can get lost in another world–literally another world. I recently tried and gave up on Nicole Krauss’s celebrated The History of Love because it just never reeled me in. I appreciated her literary aspirations and command of language but I was left wondering, “Where is the plot?” I’m not against books that want to traffic in the everyday–and certainly The History of Love had a lot of poetry, magic, and history in it–but I need a story more than I need a beautiful experience. And nobody does story like geeks!