I spent a considerable portion of my teenage years wasting away in front of books like Windows Internals in the hopes that I would be slightly better at writing

I spent a considerable portion of my teenage years wasting away in front of books like Windows Internals in the hopes that I would be slightly better at writing rootkits and exploits than the next guy. It's a pretty fulfilling skill and meeting someone with real (I stress real) deep kernel knowledge basically never happens, which can give you a reputation for solving the unsolvable, which is both positive and negative. As you may have surmised however, it's effectively commercially useless to have reverse engineering, assembly or kernel mode driver development skills -- That considered, I'd highly recommend you give it a shot, 'Understanding the Linux Kernel' and 'Windows Internals' are some of my favorite technical books. If you have only a rudimentary understanding of memory paging and assembly, I'd recommend 'Reversing: The Art of Reverse Engineering' and 'The art of exploitation' both published by No Starch (Which also publishes two highly recommended, but certainly not my favorite - "Designing BSD Rootkits" and "Art of Assembly"). Best of luck!