February was a good reading month. Three books finished, one abandoned halfway through (no regrets).
The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro
I'd been putting this off for years, assuming I knew what it was about. I was wrong about what it was about. It's a novel about self-deception dressed up as a novel about butlering and English country houses. Stevens is one of the great unreliable narrators — not because he lies to us, but because he lies so sincerely to himself.
The prose is slow and controlled in a way that rewards patience. By the end I found myself reading very carefully, catching all the moments where Stevens almost admits something and then doesn't.
Four Thousand Weeks — Oliver Burkeman
A productivity book that's actually an anti-productivity book. The central argument is that time management as a genre is built on a fantasy — the fantasy that you can eventually get on top of everything. You can't. There will always be more. The question is what to do with that fact.
Burkeman's answer is to accept finitude and make deliberate choices about what to neglect. It's more liberating than it sounds. I've stopped feeling guilty about the unread pile.
Abandonment: The Innovator's Dilemma
Halfway through and it's not holding up. The core insight is genuinely important but the book is padded to about three times its natural length with case studies that all make the same point. I know when I'm being padded at. Life's too short.
That's February. Currently reading Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and making slow but happy progress.