Introduction (with disclaimer)

This is probably a very bad idea. I thought I'd say that now, so I won't feel bad if this doesn't work out.

So this is the plan: we will read the books and listen to the music on this list, and we're going to try to do so without spending any money, using freely available electronic texts. So we'll go down the list, reading and blogging. "We" is me, Mia, all around dork, and my friend Kim, who also answers to that description. We don't really have a good reason for doing this, apart from personal interest. I for one have always been drawn to pointless information and impractical hobbies, so why not this project too?

As for my western civilization background, I was originally a medieval studies major (yeah, seriously, people actually still study that) before switching over to the somewhat more practical study of computing. I say "somewhat more practical" because I don't make a living off what I learned about either the Middle Ages or programming, so in that sense they are equally useful and useless to me. However, having a degree with the word "computer" on it seems to impress people, so I would have to say that wins by a hair.