I started in circulation, checking books in and out, reshelving carts, the job people picture when they hear “library job.” Cataloging happened almost by accident, a coworker went on leave and I filled in for six weeks and never really came back out of it. Eleven years now, mostly periodicals, mostly subject headings and cross references that maybe four patrons a semester actually notice exist.

People assume this ruins reading for pleasure, turns every book into a specimen instead of a story. It doesn’t, mostly. If anything I read more widely because of it, since I’m handling things across every subject heading in the building, not just the ones I’d pick for myself off a shelf. That’s honestly how I ended up with a complexity theory book from the eighties sitting next to a Cordwainer Smith collection on my nightstand, which is not a pairing I’d have arrived at on my own.

Here’s the part that did get ruined though: I cannot read a book anymore without some part of my brain quietly assigning it a subject heading. Seeing Like a State, for me, is not really “political science,” not in my head, it’s something closer to organizational theory crossed with agricultural history crossed with a kind of applied epistemology nobody’s invented a clean heading for yet. I know this is not how normal people read. I’ve stopped apologizing for it.

The thing that actually surprised me, coming into this job, was how much the classification work maps onto the board game shelf at home. Denise, who I work with in acquisitions and also runs our Thursday night group in the staff lounge, teases me about alphabetizing my games by designer instead of title, and I get why that reads as strange to her, since title is the obvious axis. But designer is the actual meaningful category if you’re trying to find “something like the last thing I enjoyed,” the same way subject heading beats alphabetical-by-author if you’re trying to find “something like the last thing I read.” A patron looking for books about state power doesn’t care that they start with different letters. A player who liked Aeon’s End doesn’t care what letter Kemet starts with either, they want the next thing that scratches the same itch.

I’m aware this makes me insufferable at parties, the two people who’ve ever asked me what I do for a living have both visibly regretted it within about ninety seconds. But once you’ve spent eleven years thinking in terms of “what actually connects to what,” you stop being able to unsee it, in books or on a shelf of cardboard boxes with dice in them. The job didn’t kill the pleasure of reading. It just rewired what pleasure I’m actually chasing when I pick something up, which I think is a better trade than the one people assume happened.