In 1997, a friend gave me a book. "You'll like this," she said. It took me months to actually start reading it, but once I did, I just couldn't stop. That year, I must've read that book more than five times. It was brilliant, smart, and most of all, hilarious.   

That book was High Fidelity, the best-selling novel by Nick Hornby. The Guardian called it "an instant classic." It was. Five years after it was published, it was made into a movie starring John Cusack. The film did well, too, although many would vouch that the book was way better than the film.   

What made High Fidelity so close to our hearts? Apart from the deep end of a failing relationship (that most single thirty-somethings could relate to), it was the music and its mind-boggling references that filled us with something to jump about. Here we have three characters so obsessed with music that all they ever do is sit around talking about it. They're so deep in their narcissistic knowledge of music that they tend to poke fun at people with less musical vocabulary than them. They sit around at the record store they own and work at, and make up lists of their "Top 5" of everything. And then they debate. Barry and Dick, the store's workers, are always at each other's throats about every single thing, musically. And Rob, the store's owner goes around arranging his gigantic record collection "autobiographically."   

Look around, these people actually exist in the non-literary, non-visual world.   

Are you one of them?