What is … The Donoghue Interregnum?

The whole while that Stevereads has been rolling out its annual assessments of the best – and worst – books of every passing year – that annual Gotterdamerung so secretly feared and yet so eagerly anticipated by publishers, authors, publicists, and readers alike – there’s been a gap, an omission that’s been bothering me just a bit more with each installment. While each year-end Stevereads account is of course completely authoritative, the process itself has been circumscribed by its own format: Stevereads is, after all, a blog of fairly recent vintage. What about all the books that came before it?

Well, when it comes to those books, the world wasn’t entirely without guidance. A long time ago, and for a long time, I reviewed books regularly for the reading public, both under my own name and a small suite of carefully-crafted pseudonyms, for any newspaper that would pay me $50 or the equivalent in review copies (I was also an Arts section editor for a time, which naturally presented more opportunities). I was nothing like as prolific back then as I am nowadays, but even so: if a new book appeared, there was at least a chance I’d review it.

Then a pernicious dream clapped ahold of me. I thought: I don’t really want to be chasing review copies and wooing editors and hurrying to make deadlines – what I really want to be doing is forging honest, face-to-face connections with actual readers. Rather than faintly damning some new book in a column that would soon be forgotten by even its most loyal fans, I thought, I shall become a bookseller and personally talk to people about books.

Utterly daft, but I was determined. And so, after a brief interlude in which I left the country (for, it turns out, the very last time), I slipped on a bookseller’s apron and went to work at the Information Desk of a big, busy retail bookstore. And for many years following that decision, the only people who got to hear what I thought about some new release were the young co-workers who clocked in and out with me every day and the harried customers who filed in the front door week after week and made their way to my Info Desk. The rest of the world groped in darkness.

I’ve come to think of it as the Donoghue Interregnum.

And this year, prior to my normal year-end festivities, I’ve decided to redress that grievous wrong I so thoughtlessly inflicted on the reading public. In the run-up to my 2015 version of the year’s best – and worst – books, I’m going to assess each year of my absence from the Republic of Letters, fifteen entries taking us from 1990 to 2005.

There’ll need to be some fairly stringent ground rules, of course. For instance, in the interests of actually getting through such a vast amount of books, I’ll be dispensing with my current profusion of sub-categories and sticking to ten “Fiction” picks and ten “Nonfiction” picks (and this isn’t only in the spirit of brevity – it also dovetails nicely with the equally limited scope of the earliest Stevereads listing from 2006). And I’m also dispensing with the “Worst” listings for those 15 years – not only does it feel a bit too much like kicking somebody’s tombstone to heap opprobrium on a work that might be two decades old, but some of the most likely targets of those kicks have since gone on to please me, and even, in one or two cases, end up on post-2006 “Best” lists for later works. Better, I thought, to let an atmosphere of optimism prevail.

And so, starting tomorrow, the chronicling of the Donoghue Interregnum begins with the year 1990! Be sure to join me, and see how your old favorites fare!