Thursday, January 29, 2009

Changed My Mind

I had originally planned on posting today about the Amish Friendship Bread starter I recieved from a friend last week, but I think I'll wait and take pictures of M making it this afternoon.

In the meantime, something caught my eye at the library this morning. I was looking for a copy of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. **not there in the fiction A's.... hmmmm, none of her books are in the fiction section** I went to the computer/card catalog. Sense and Sensibility has the Dewey Decimal System classification of 823.7. 823 is the class for English fiction. American fiction is classed as 813. How long does it take for something to make it from the strictly alphabetical fiction section to the DDS numbered system?

Anyway, I found the book I was looking for in section 823. Naturally, there were other English works closeby: poetry, drama, essays, speeches... As I looked around, this title caught my eye:


I have read a few of Asimov's books: The Foundation Series; I, Robot; The Naked Sun. I liked them all. This one, I had never heard of. I looked it up. My favorite quote from one of the reviews is this one:
"Fans of Asimov's science-fiction generally have little taste for door-stopper books such as Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare or The Shaping of England, and specialists are never happy to see clever outsiders make hay in their fields." (The Tragedy of Isaac Asimov)
I discovered that the book I saw was not the original publication. Here's what it looked like in 1970. And it was published in 2 volumes.

You just never know what you're going to find when you're not looking for it, do you?

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