by Natalie Gross

Brian Wilson isn’t your average book nerd.

He has an engineering degree, owns a pair of CrossFit gyms and can share war stories from numerous deployments over more than a decade as an intelligence officer in the Marine Corps and Reserves.

But Wilson, 39, would rather talk about classical literature any day.

“You read something in the 1300s about a pilgrimage to Canterbury, and you’re like, ‘What does this have to do with me?’” he said, spotting Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous work sitting on his packed bookshelf during a recent interview. “Then you start digging into these characters and digging into their dialogue. Then you think, ‘Oh my God. People haven’t changed at all.’”