The Remains of the Day isn't just my favorite book from Ishiguro. It is my favorite book, period. It is a book about many things, but one of the main themes is

The Remains of the Day isn't just my favorite book from Ishiguro. It is my favorite book, period. It is a book about many things, but one of the main themes is regret. As a younger person, I thought I would end up following the trajectory of Stevens. The narrative matched mine so much that I thought it was a description of an inexorable path in life that someone like me was bound to follow. As I got older, I realized the opposite: that Stevens was an anti-hero, that I did NOT have to follow the his trajectory, and that I had the agency to make different choices in life. In that way, the book's anti-message guides me today. p.s. with regards to Ishiguro, despite liking RotD, I didn't care for any of his other works. I didn't like Never Let me Go (which was highly acclaimed), nor the Buried Giant, nor When we were Orphans. Admittedly I have not read "An Artist of the Floating World".