The Remains of the Day
In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past...A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.
Stats for nerds
19recommend
31mentions
27people
2010–2026years
65% recommend35% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I agree, the more likely psychology of the Greg character is that he doesn't understand the way he presents himself in the pictures damns his surface level framing. You can really go quite far with more sophisticated versions of this technique in fiction -- Ishiguro's Remains of the Day is my favorite example!
- “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives one.”
Knowledge is prerequisite for all else. Do pity the millions who will grow old before reading Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day’ - you too? Could you see its point?
Society is too large to see itself; someone must observe on our behalf. In this pursuit poesy may tell truth where ten thousand theses have honestly lied.
Upton Sinclair was not a meat processor.
- Three Booker prize winners I’m particularly fond of:
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is another recent literary favorite
- I believe you're right. Edwin Black's "IBM and the Holocaust" and Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day" both played their part in revising my naive ideas about simple narratives of WW2.
But look at this post made here a couple of days ago [0]. It's absolutely back in fashion. I think technofascism really is a thing now - you can feel certain people getting quite giddy with thoughts of power.
- This is something I have been trying to work on lately - just cramming my head full of stuff that can be processed in the ol' background thread.
What I have found is that sometimes, some seemingly innocuous thing I read years ago will pop out at just the right moment, some neural connection forms and all of a sudden I have the basis of a whole rabbit hole of interesting thoughts.
I think it's important to fill your mind with good stuff, things that have the necessary depth and maybe enough subjectivity that they're ripe for that kind of background processing. You are probably not going to have deep interesting thoughts about Twilight (although maybe you will, no judgment.) But philosophy, poetry, great fiction, even religious texts - they're all crammed with symbolism and really reward re-reads and deep thoughts.
A recent example of this for me is Kazuo Ishiguro's book The Remains of the Day. It was mentioned on a podcast I like and so I picked it up on something of a whim during a library visit.
The book is about a butler who served a "great English house" and when I started it I was deeply skeptical that I would enjoy it. But it's a great example of the kind of work that really bears out for thinking on, and since I finished it I've really enjoyed turning things over in my mind. I'm usually a genre fiction guy (sci-fi, horror) and a lot of those books just don't have the same depth.
I don't mean to disparage "light reading" because I'm truly not that kind of. snide intellectual douche. But it's really fascinating sort of watching your brain pick something apart that warrants deep thought, and it's a really cool feeling to be in some discussion with my wife and think "oh my god, that bit from the introduction of book XYZ is so perfect right now, I need to share it and talk about it."
One other book that I've really enjoyed the "post-processing" phase on is The Essential Rumi - the Coleman Barks translation. Those little poems are so rich and full of meaning, and it's seriously rewarding to let your brain go to town on them.
- Crime and Punishment
Leaves of Grass
Persuasion
Foundation
The Diary of Lady Murasaki
The Remains of the Day
Travels in Siberia
Anabasis
A Brief History of Time
The Rebel
