Is it Friday yet ?

[venta]

Oh look, it's Elizabeth trying to sneak enormous philosophical issues into a scratty little cut...

I'm currently reading Antonia Fraser's biography of Mary, Queen of Scots. Which has so far been interesting, although it has consistently unsettled me with its strange word-order within sentences. Owing to my unsociable habit of reading while eating, it's also rather more splattered with miso soup than any book on Scottish history should rightfully be.

However, in talking about the behaviour of the Scottish nobility around the time Mary returned to Scotland, it says:

"there is a basic code of human decency, which should not be violated even in times of insecurity" (quote approximate, as I don't have the book with me).

Which struck me as rather a sweeping assumption to just drop into the middle of a pargraph. I'm not even sure I agree with it. I'm wondering if it's the hypothetical should of someone who knows it isn't them whose going to be suffering the insecurity...

Discuss :)

Today's slightly less in-depth question: why, when placing multi-volume books on shelves, do the volumes always seem to go right to left ? It seems an odd convention, in view of the left-to-right nature of our society. I'm hoping addedentry might know the answer to this one.

I'm tired. My neck hurts.

On the plus side, a colleague brought me a CD this morning of what he describes as "home-brew chilled dance/ambient with celtic crossovery things going on" which he made, as is traditional, in his bedroom.

I'm quite liking it so far.

Comments

Re: Books going right to left

[ao-lai.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it, I do put books on shelves so that the volumes go from left to right.

If I had to stack some books, I would indeed put the first volume on the bottom, specifically so that they would be in the 'correct' order when put on a shelf.

So I guess I've been doing it wrong all these years?

Re: Books going right to left

[triskellian]

Books on shelves in my house start at the first one on the left and move to the last one on the right (because I naturally expect to read left to right, and to start at the first one).

Books in stacks in my house start at the last one on the bottom and finish at the first one on the top (because then I can take the first one from the top of the pile and when I've finished it, be reasonably certain that the next one to read is the next in the pile).

I'm slightly disturbed to find that for each of those paragraphs I was visualising a particular series of books. The first is the Dragonrider books and the second is the Anne of Green Gables books. These are by no means the only series of books in my house, they are not my favourite series of books, and although I read AoGG recently, I've not read any Dragonrider books for years, and I haven't read the rest of AoGG for even longer. How peculiar.

Re: Books going right to left

[zandev.livejournal.com]

Yup, this is what I do as well. I order books such that they are left-to-right on a shelf and top-to-bottom in a stack. Yes, this does mean I have to reorder them when doing a stack to shelf transition.