The Remains of the Day and the Rest of 2025's Read-Alongs

Translations, rough schedules, emerging themes

At the end of this month, we’ll be starting our read-along of The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. This is a short novel, and so it will only take us a few weeks to complete. Here’s the schedule:

• June 30: Prologue, Chapters 1 & 2

• July 7: Chapters 3-5

• July 14: Chapters 6-7

• July 20: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8PM Eastern

The good news is that this will get us back on to my original schedule, and so in August we’ll start Chuang Tzu/Zhuangzi. (After that, we’ll read Aristotle’s Politics, bringing us to the end of the year already!)

Ishiguro’s novel is a meditation on duty and loyalty. I won’t say much more than that, as we’ll soon be reading it together, but I think you can see why it fits in so well with the other works we have been reading this year. Mrs Dalloway is bound by social convention; Shevek attempts to be true to himself in opposition to two worlds; Socrates has tried to define the perfectly just state which, ultimately, cares for the soul.

Salman Rushdie wrote of the novel:

The real story here is that of a man destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life. Stevens is much preoccupied by "greatness", which, for him, means something very like restraint. The greatness of the British landscape lies, he believes, in its lack of the "unseemly demonstrativeness" of African and American scenery. It was his father, also a butler, who epitomised this idea of greatness; yet it was just this notion which stood between father and son, breeding deep resentments and an inarticulacy of the emotions that destroyed their love.

I think this will be a very good time, and I look forward to reading it with you. In the rest of this post, I want to write about the why of all of this reading and talk about translations for the remaining two books.

The Why of It All

When I started this newsletter, I was interested in hosting these read-alongs. I saw it as a way to read more philosophy with people, and I hoped that we’d have some good discussions along the way. The read-alongs have changed substantially over the past few years. The first one, on Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, was sporadic, more of a series of reading reflections than a proper book club. The read-alongs took on more of a structure when we read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics with each other.

In 2025, I did not think much about particular themes. We were continuing with Arendt’s The Human Condition, and I knew I wanted to continue at roughly this pace, so I began to think of some books. I chose books that were interesting to me at the time: either I’d read them many times or had been meaning to read them. I did not think much about the cohesion of the entire project.

Yet, themes have emerged. There is a strong slant toward ethics and political philosophy: Arendt’s Human Condition is at least concerned with the moral, the Republic is of course about justice, and the novels we’ve read all have some deeper ethical conflict at their heart. This year has returned again and again to the problems of how we want to organize our lives together and how an individual can survive in society. The Remains of the Day carries on this theme, as does Aristotle’s Politics. Zhuangzi might be the exception, though I am sure we will find points of contact.

So I suppose the question ‘Why did you choose these books?’ has two answers:

• I chose them because I wanted to read them

• Unconsciously, I was selecting books speaking to a real and present need.

It is no secret that the United States is in a moment of fracture. Globally, in fact, we’re all experiencing it — some much more directly than others, as bombs fall from the sky or border policies change day-to-day. I have always thought that in moments like this, philosophy demonstrates some of its value. We can ask the big questions that we have tried our best to ignore.

Next year, I’ll be more careful with selections. I’ve already selected the theme: the philosophy of technology. Everything we read will be centered around the following question: What role do we want technology to play in our lives? We’ll read philosophers, social scientists, and a few journalists to try and make sense of technology and ourselves.

This year didn’t have an explicit theme — yet, a theme emerged. A timely theme, in fact. Next year, who knows what will emerge.

The Rest of the Year

After we read The Remains of the Day, we’ll read Zhuangzi and Aristotle. Zhuangzi will be read in August and September, and then we’ll finish the year with Aristotle. (If at all possible, I want to finish Aristotle’s Politics before the new year.)

For Zhuangzi, I want to recommend the Oxford World Classics edition of his writings, translated by Chris Fraser. Fraser also provides a structure to the text that allows us to easily read it together. This is the edition I will read, and it is the one I’ll reference. Other editions may divide the text in different ways: beware!

Aristotle’s Politics has a much more standardized division. So, you can read any translation you want. But this is the one I’ll be reading: the University of Chicago edition translated by Carnes Lord.

Each of these is available for under $20 from various online retailers. You have a few months to find a copy.

Thank you, everyone, who has joined any of the discussions so far. I look forward to many more with you.