Conventional wisdom aside, let’s be real: A lot of us decide whether we’re interested in reading a particular book by judging its cover—and its title, too.

So we asked our resident book experts:

What’s a book you can’t resist, based on its title alone?

Here’s our list of 60+ books, with thanks as always to our Recommendations Community here at NYPL for their awesome suggestions. (Want to tell us your favorite title? Leave a comment on this post!)

Apocalypse Meow Meow 

 The Art of Eating

Away Laughing on a Fast Camel  

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu 

Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance

The Castle of Crossed Destinies

Dancing With Cats

The Devil’s Picnic: Around the World in Pursuit of Forbidden Fruit

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things 

The End of Your Life Book Club

Emperor Mollusk vs. the Sinister Brain

Everything Sucks: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest For Cool

Food: A Love Story

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest, and died a Penitent : Written from her own Memorandums

Geek Love

The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil

The Glass Sentence

Go the F*ck to Sleep

GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human

Gold Fame Citrus

A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich 

The Hoboken Chicken Emergency

Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It

How to Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You

Hurts Like a Mother: A Cautionary Alphabet 

I Could Pee on This: and Other Poems by Cats

I Woke Up Dead at the Mall

It Ain’t So Awful, Falafel

It Ended Badly: Thirteen of the Worst Breakups in History

The Kalahari Typing School for Men

Kasher in the Rye

Kill the Boy Band

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry

The Night Circus

Polaroids from the Dead

The Rogue Not Taken

Sex Criminals, Vol. 1

Slaughterhouse 5, or, the Children’s Crusade: A Duty-dance with Death

The Smell of Other People’s Houses

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons From the Crematory

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish 

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers 

Stranger than Naked, or How to Write Dirty Books for Fun and Profit

Strong Female Protagonist

This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

Three Martini Lunch

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before

Trace Elements in the Human Hair 

Unabrow: Misadventures of a Late Bloomer 

Undermajordomo Minor

Unholy Night 

Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories & Other Disasters,

We Are Pirates

We Are the Birds of the Coming Storm.

We Can Never Go Home 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love 

When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal

Yours Til Niagara Falls, Abby

Have trouble reading standard print? Many of these titles are available in formats for patrons with print disabilities.

Staff picks are chosen by NYPL staff members and are not intended to be comprehensive lists. We'd love to hear your ideas too, so leave a comment and tell us what you’d recommend. And check out our Staff Picks browse tool for more recommendations!