Your second appointment is 15 minutes late, so you chip away at your ''delay'' reading. You scan contents and tear out articles you want to keep. Wham! The rest goes into the deep six.

To sugarcoat the pill of payment the receiver of the tax was wont to refer to it disparagingly in the diminutive, calling it “la huchette,” “the little tax on a fish stall.”

But in the end, mainly crying out, he fell to raling and wringing his master, upbraiding him that he was not a true Philosopher[…].

Japanese is traditionally written downwards (tategaki) and you begin reading from the top right of a page. This means that books are opened from what we would consider to be the back. Nowadays, however, books, newspapers and magazines are often written western style, in horizontal lines (yokogaki) from left to right and, in these cases, the book is opened from our (western) understanding of the front.