Book nerd alert!

I am a nerd. There, I said it. I would rather listen to music and curl up with a good book than watch a sitcom. There’s only been a handful of shows I’ve religiously watched over the years: “Seinfeld,” “The Sopranos” and the first seasons of “Rome” and “Big Love.”

Since I was 3 years old, I’ve been a reader. As my mother proudly boasts, I taught myself when I began to recognize words from my beloved Dr. Seuss books, and it’s been a love affair ever since. Part of my love of books also stems from the fact that I am a closet “novelist” and work on several ideas I have when I can.

Being such a bookworm, I’ve always prided myself on not seeing any movie based on a book until I’ve read the book. I just finished “I Am Legend” and look forward to seeing Will Smith take on the main character. I might even go so far as to see Charlton Heston’s and Vincent Price’s take on Robert Neville in “The Omega Man,” and “The Last Man on Earth,” respectively, both based on “I Am Legend.”

“The Da Vinci Code” movie was absolutely ridiculous. The images I saw in my head while reading were so much better than what they did with that film. On the other side of the coin, I loved the movies adaptations of “300,” “White Oleander” and “Bridget Jones’ Diary” as much as I loved the books.

I’ll see with wariness another one of my favorites, “The Lovely Bones,” come to life on the big screen next year. And God forbid someone decides to make my ultimate favorite book, “The Historian.” Please just leave it to us fans the way we have it in our heads, unless, of course, Hollywood can actually bring to life Vlad the Impaler to play himself.

So what the hell was this “snooty reader” doing last night with a rented copy of “No Country for Old Men,” especially since I didn’t yet read Cormac McCarthy’s novel? Because I couldn’t help myself. Based on the buzz alone created by nearly every movie writer in the nation, I wanted to see this film even before it won its slew of Oscars.

It has Tommy Lee Jones as a sheriff? Must see! The usually smoldering sexy Javier Bardem as the creepy Anton Chigurh? I’ve always been interested in him ever since a late-night viewing of one of his first films — 1992’s Spanish-language “Jamon, jamon.” There were no subtitles, and I speak not a lick of Spanish, he’s just that hot.

From the gruesome opening scene to the fade-to-black, I watched this fantastically disturbing yet gripping film with my mouth completely agape and my heart pounding. It certainly isn’t for the weak of heart.

The three main characters (Jones as Sheriff Bell, Josh Brolin as the in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time-with-a-bad-idea Llewelyn Moss and Bardem’s Chigurh) are all fascinating.

From Brolin’s survival strength, Jones’ steadfast lawman that we’ve come to expect from him and Bardem’s believably unbelievable lack of emotion, “No Country” was mind-blowing. What really drives it home is the knowledge that there really are psychotic people like Chigurh, and, by reading or watching the news, there seems to be more and more of them every day.

That’s a true horror film — not featuring some masked knife-wielder but the reality that this can and does happen by people who seem like you and me. To capture something so perfectly on film is a feat all in itself, but to capture that in the written word is something a writer can only dream of getting right.

Though I broke my personal “snooty reader” code of conduct, I still cannot wait to read the book and see what else my mind will add to the story of Bell, Moss and Chigurh. Hopefully, though, I’ll be able to sleep a little easier than I did last night.