FREEEEEEDOM!

Freeeeeeeeeeeedom!!!!!!

Don't be jealous, but A Reader's Respite has spent the last two weeks doing something that we've been dreaming about for quite some time:

Reading whatever the hell we feel like reading!

That's right....no advance copies, no uncorrected proofs, no publisher copies waiting for reviews.  We just picked up whatever book we felt like and then we read it.

We're calling it liberation and the sheer joy of the feeling is simply indescribable.  No deadlines looming over your shoulder, no mentally re-arranging Mt. TBR to suit publisher's needs, no feeling of obligation whatsoever.

The effect is absolutely liberating.  A Reader's Respite now remembers why we love books so much.  A well-written book can transport the reader out of time and space and into another life, another world.  It exposes the reader to different ideas and different life experiences that make us all so diverse and unique.  But it seems worth noting that books can only do this if the reader is of the appropriate mind set at the time.  Reading a book because you have to can (and frequently does) take away the magic that resides within books.

Are we advocating that all book bloggers chuck their review copies?  Well, no.  But we are suggesting that taking a holiday from what you have to read and picking up books that you want to read can have an invigorating, liberating effect on the mind of a bibliophile.

It's okay.  You can be a teensy bit jealous.