Return of the Reluctant Calls It a Day

Posted 18 December, 2007 in Uncategorized |

Ed Champion, the prodigious litblogger who is the driving force behind Return of the Reluctant, has decided to pull the plug on the blog after four years.

The blog, whose name and inaugural post on December 2, 2003 (along with an accompanying quote from The Godfather, Part III) always did suggest a kind of love/hate relationship with the form, was a mainstay for those of us who troll the literary byways of Web 2.0. Along with his podcast series, The Bat Segundo Show (which Ed assures us will continue), Return of the Reluctant provided a sometimes overwhelming daily dose of literary news, links, and gossip. It was written in an arch, sarcastic style, and was unafraid to criticize mainstream news organs such as the New York Times Book Review (a favourite whipping boy of Champion’s) and Time’s Lev Grossman, who wrote a piece for the magazine entitled “My Mortal Enemy” about Champion.

I was frequently astounded by the sheer amount of material on the site — at times I half believed that Champion employed a platoon of researchers and typists to create and collate the mountains of content that he posted daily — and enjoyed the author’s contrarian (and often ironic and hyperbolic, something his critics were seemingly unable to understand) take on the literary matters of the day.

Ed is leaving the blogosphere (for the moment: he’s done this before, but insists that this time, he’s serious) to devote more time to his journalism and to a novel in progress. TSR thanks him for the enjoyment he’s provided over the last four years, and wishes him all the best in his future endeavours.

1 comment to “Return of the Reluctant Calls It a Day”

August, December 18th, 2007 at 1:49 pm:

• Bit of a shame, really. The Bat Segundo Show was always my least favourite part of the site (annoying intros aside, he tends to ask the same question over and over again if he doesn’t get the answer he was expecting or wanted to hear, and it’s pretty common to hear the authors start to get angry at the fact that he’s just not getting it, but not letting go either, and more than once I’ve stopped listening part way through because it became painful to listen to), but I’ve always enjoyed how his contrarian stick-poking played out in blog form.

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