Even-Bigger-Than-Yesterday's-News

Blogging is a funny thing.  When A Reader's Respite announced yesterday that the blog would be retiring, we felt a huge sense of relief...after all, writing snark is more difficult than one might think.  It's hard to stay snarky on a daily basis.

You might imagine our complete and utter surprise when we awoke this morning to an inbox FULL OF LETTERS expressing disappointment in our "retirement."  We were shocked.  We thought it was a hoax.  We had to drink a pot of coffee and ponder the meaning of all this.

Well, we are now well into our second pot of coffee and have decided that a few blog posts full of snark each week isn't going to hurt any of us.  For those of you who took the time to write a letter, A Reader's Respite's cold, black heart is truly touched.    And our blog secretary tells us he would be thrilled to come out of retirement and have some work for a change (since his film career clearly isn't going anywhere these days).

Our new online lit magazine, The Lit Asylum, will forge ahead as planned and we hope you all get a chance to visit.  But for the snarky, evil commentary that it would be UNPROFESSIONAL of us to feature in a genuine, lit magazine, you'll have to keep visiting us here at A Reader's Respite.

For now, we're going to see if the enormous amount of hype surrounding the release of Erin Morgenstern's new novel, The Night Circus, was genuine or all a bunch of smoke and mirrors.  The Huffington Post called the book "the next Harry Potter," (Really?  Are you trying to kill the book before it's even released?) which gave us a horrible case of the shudders.  Still, we couldn't help but be vaguely interested in a book that garnered such a huge amount of pre-publication publicity targeting a Harry Potter and Twilight audience while earning Ms. Morgenstern a six-figure advance.  This is a big gamble for Doubleday....think it will pay off?

We hope so and we're hoping we love the book....anything to get the bad taste of Philippa Gregory's new release, The Lady of the Rivers, out of our mouth.  Ewww.  But that's a story for another day....