booknotes

[dichroic]

1) It’s always pleasant when I can find a Jane Austen fanfic I can read without wincing. Sherwood Smith has a few stories (novellas?) out, available at Amazon: The Poignant Sting, a followup to Emma, and Henry and Fanny, an alternate ending. But what I wasn’t expecting was for the former to end with what might be two of the most powerful sentences I’ve ever come across, especially as I was reading in the wake of the Charleston shootings:

“Faith does not answer questions. All it does is sustain our belief that one day we will find the answers.”

2) I’ve also been reading the Corinna Chapman mysteries, a modern series by Kerry Greenwood, author of Phryne Fisher. Corinna is very different than Phryne, but she strikes me as someone who could have created Phryne if she (Corinna) were a writer rather than a baker. Thus I suspect that Corinna has a lot of Greenwood herself in her character. (Phryne always strikes me as wish fulfillment in exactly the same way Lord Peter Wimsey was for Sayers – not who you’d want to have, but who you’d want to be.) But I would just like to say that someone with a knowledge of astronomy, meeting a man named Kepler, is really, really not likely to start spouting off about his three lawas and how Newton proved them with GMm/r^2. And I say this as an engineer with an MS in space science who has known people named Fermi and Kelvin.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.