rereads

Sometimes, you need a little comfort food—and at io9, that can mean “re-watching a favorite Star Wars show” or “guzzling midnight margaritas while watching Sandra Bullock play a witch” or “picking up a book and rediscovering the joy of reading.” We love new releases, don’t get us wrong, but we also dig revisiting past…Read more... Sometimes, you need a little comfort food—and at io9, that can mean “re-watching a favorite Star Wars show” or “guzzling midnight margaritas while watching Sandra Bullock play a witch” or…

Ethan Frome is not your typical festive book. There are no fabulous parties or thawed hearts, no warming morals about the power of togetherness realised with a fireplace crackling somewhere in the background. In fact, Edith Wharton’s 1911 novella is a melancholy, mean little story, as chilly in tone as the lonely Massachusetts landscape with its “sheet of snow perpetually renewed from … pale skies”. And yet, there’s something in it that makes it a perfect read for those slushy days between Christmas and new year. Perhaps…

I’m aware that this must hardly be the first time you’ve had David Copperfield pressed on you. Not that I have any compunction about recommending such a masterpiece again. This novel has not yet been praised enough, even though we are approaching 175 years since it first appeared between two covers, in 1850.To list all the virtues of the work Dickens himself called “his favourite child” would require a volume as long as the actual 250,000-word doorstopper. Instead, let me just focus on just one: Betsey Trotwood.David…

Fleur Jaeggy would like to see herself as something of a mystic.It’s something she aspires to, she admitted in an interview last year. The word mystic derives from the Greek mustē, an “initiated person”. When re-reading Sweet Days of Discipline, arguably the Swiss Italian author’s most famous work, it’s evident that she is such a person. Jaeggy is in on a secret, reaching at something beyond our understanding. Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy. Photograph: And Other StoriesThe novel from 1989, both slim and…