books
About a month ago, I read and adored
The Coffin of Honey by Geoffrey Morrison (2026). I have been trying to write a review ever since. It is set in the near future, roughly 40 years after the global political order fractured and rearranged. Workers and the oppressed around the world established a communist alliance, leaving the formerly dominant powers to shuffle themselves around.
( details )Alien ships start appearing. This is a first contact story, but on its own, idiosyncratic terms. The novel follows several characters -- a Kerala politician who has the first alien encounter; a Persian poet on a collective farm; an anonymous author, possibly a lunatic; a Haitian-Canadian hospital worker; and a
US spy/agent provocateur -- in the years that follow contact. Different power centers seek to exploit the alien encounters for their own gains, but that is a minor plot thread.
This is a terrible attempt at a review, I'm sorry. I feel like I have to give all this background in order to enthuse about it, but at the same time, I don't want to spoil it. (I dislike spoilerphobia enormously, but there is something to the pleasure of discovery when first experiencing something as beautifully crafted as this book, so I'm torn.)
I love this book for how much it challenges itself and the reader. It loves the Red world it has conjured; and its critiques of our contemporary shitstorms are fantastic -- for example
( ex ) The book is in love with people, with literature, with human expression, with
art and language, and I love that so much. A recurring image, of course, is Alexander the Great, figure of imperial conquest, preserved in his coffin of honey, but the narrative also encompasses/includes the Persian epic Shahnameh's accounts of his life. References to world poetry and film and narrative literature and folk song abound, from Malayalam ghazals to Genet's experience in Beirut, and together they braid into a celebration of human creative potential in a way that I cannot fully express. That creativity can connect us, that expression is a social technology for solidarity, that art
matters: these convictions animate the book. It awards beauty, and the appreciation of beauty (aesthetics), to the people, and I can't get over that.
It's also beautifully written:
She was writing a poisonous golden cry, au hasard, the sound of a universe breaking open from love run ragged, raspy, unromantic, almost dinosaur-like in its rawness.
And the voices change, depending on whose perspective is being assumed; the USian disinfo provocateur might as well be in an entirely different book, for instance.
I'm not doing justice to this, I'm sorry. I just love and admire it so much. It imagines a whole world and then it builds a complex, beautiful exploration of it that pays tribute to human beauty and expression in so many different forms.
*
By nature we are creatures of hope, always ready to be deceived again, caught by the marvel that might be wrapped in the grubbiest brown paper parcel.
This week I read J.L. Carr's
A Month in the Country (1980), which is a brief, terrifically powerful account of a man restoring a painting in a small Yorkshire church in the summer of 1920. I can't get over how directly and simply this is told, yet how affecting it is. He has survived hell on Earth in the war; now he is half-alive. His time in the village helps him, but in no way fully heals him. There's still so much regret, so much left undone and unsaid. Rather than his trauma being directly depicted (or even named), as it would be in a novel published today, it instead emerges sidewise, glancing, in what he feels and what he does not feel. So his recovery, if you can even call it that, is similarly flickering and incomplete. The connections he makes, both "in space" with locals and back through time with the church's original painter, are at best half-formed, but that is, somehow, deeply affecting. This is Melancholy: The Book, and I loved it. (I did have one nitpick:
( ... )*
I don't know what I'm reading next. I've been doing a lot of "research" for
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ficinabox project(s) but I guess talking about that would run counter to the whole anon thing (and, anyway, the research is just stressing me out more about getting things wrong and irrevocably fucking up, so).
I thought about checking out the new Emily St. John Mandel but I haven't read her other work and apparently I would miss stuff? Argh. I'm also considering Hamid Ismailov's
We Computers (2025) and Naomi Alderman's
The Strangers (2026).
I started, then stopped,
Nice Dragons Finish Last by Rachel Aaron (2014) and
Ariel by Steven Boyett (1983). They were both excruciating.
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settiai
