The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro's novel of an English butler looking back on a life of duty and regret
Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker-winning novel, narrated by Stevens, a butler on a motoring trip through 1950s England who slowly reveals how much of his life he gave to service and how much he let pass. It is a quiet book about dignity, restraint and the cost of never saying the thing that mattered. Readers in business circles tend to take it as a long meditation on regret, which is why it turns up on founders' lists alongside the management titles.
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Does it: documented as part of their own routine. Recommends: explicitly advises other people to do it. Discusses: covered it substantively without clear personal adoption; this can include criticism or disagreement.
- Jeff BezosRecommends
Amazon and Blue Origin founder · Six-page memos and eight hours of sleep
CNBC reports that Ishiguro's novel is one of his favorite books and, citing Brad Stone's biography, that its treatment of regret fed into his regret minimization framework. Stone also has him saying he learns more from novels than from nonfiction.
Source: CNBC Make It: Kazuo Ishiguro, one of Jeff Bezos' favorite authors, wins the Nobel Prize in Literature
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