Some days I look at literally multiple thousands of book titles. Mostly they scroll past on my screen really quickly. I’m looking for coding patterns and encoding oddities rather than reading the words. But I often do read the words. At least some of them. And it can be really difficult not to go, “oooh, what’s that?” and click on the link to the ebook.

These are some titles we recently added that tempted me.

• Dialogue on the infinity of love
• Doing psychotherapy effectively
• Discipline and punish
• The madman’s middle way
• Foraging: behavior and ecology
• You are still being lied to: the remixed Disinformation guide to media distortion, historical whitewashes and cultural myths
• Databases: a beginner’s guide
• Coaching and mentoring: practical conversations to improve learning
• The craft of research
• The dream encyclopedia
• Brothels, depravity, and abandoned women: illegal sex in antebellum New Orleans
• B-sides, undercurrents and overtones: peripheries to popular in music, 1960 to the present
• Being white in the helping professions: developing effective intercultural awareness
• Cognitive biology: evolutionary and developmental perspectives on mind, brain, and behavior
• Choosing craft: the artist’s viewpoint
• Wild justice: the moral lives of animals
• A short introduction to attachment and attachment disorder
• Brain sense: the science of the senses and how we process the world around us
• Nothing: a very short introduction
• The secret history of emotion: from Aristotle’s Rhetoric to modern brain science
• Impotence: a cultural history
• The politics of small things: the power of the powerless in dark times
• Marriage and cohabitation
• Headless males make great lovers: & other unusual natural histories
• Collections of nothing
• Ecological intelligence: rediscovering ourselves in nature
• Seeing ghosts: 9/11 and the visual imagination
• Day of the Dead in the USA: the migration and transformation of a cultural phenomenon
• Speaking of information: the Library juice quotation book
• From demons to Dracula: the creation of the modern vampire myth
• Everyday readers: reading and popular culture

Overall that’s a pretty good slice of my interests and obsessions. It all came across my desk in 15 minutes one day. I could spend half my time at work making lists of all the things I see that I’ll never have time to glance at, much less read.

This job has taught me things about letting go of information hoarding tendencies.

Have I mentioned that I like my job and I hope I get to keep it? Personnel called me today to set up a phone interview. This is how it is regularly done, apparently, but it amuses me that I will be interviewed over the phone by a group of people sitting in a conference room on the second floor while I sit in the first floor office of someone who will be away from her desk because she will be upstairs in the conference room interviewing me. She offered me her office so I could shut the door instead of subjecting my entire department to my interview conversation from my cube.

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