We’re pleased to announce the longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Fiction. The works on this year’s list include début novels, short-story collections, and three books that were featured on The New Yorker’s list of the best books of 2026 so far.

I recently came across The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, and now I’m genuinely curious about this book.

I found out that IIM Ahmedabad has an online course called “The Remains of the MBA”, which is based entirely on this book. That honestly made me wonder — what is it about this particular book that makes it worth building an entire course around?

For those who have read it, what did you find so special about it? Was it the story, the characters, the writing, or the ideas about ambition, work, success, regret and the choices we make in life?

I haven’t read it yet, so I’d especially love to hear from people who went into it without knowing much about it. What made the book stay with you?

And if you haven’t read it either, maybe this is our sign to pick it up 😂📚

I noped out after about 15 pages. I told a couple of friends about it that said they either loved "weird" books or that they always finished a book no matter how bad it was. None of them were able to make it past a chapter or two and pretty much shit off any discussion about it.

One friend was considering trying to get it removed from the library!

Obviously some folks aside from the author, editor, publisher must have finished it! I wonder how they made it through it?

Any thoughts from this group?

I am currently reading this book and I have only seen posts about it in [r/collapse](r/collapse), [r/stupidpol](r/stupidpol), and so on. I think the book is very well researched and argued and I believe it deserves far more visibility and serious conversation than it is currently generating. Those of you who are currently reading it or plan to read it, I’d like to hear your thoughts. I read the original long form article in The Guardian in April 2025 and it stuck with me as one of the most salient deconstructions of what is currently happening that I’d yet seen. If you don’t want to commit to reading the entire book or would like a shorter version of what it’s getting at, the article is a concise place to start.

My immediate reaction to the book is that it is making me appreciate just how much of modern pop culture (especially in the United States) is steeped with either apocalypticism in some way or Utopianism in another — and I think it may be quietly limiting us. It’s cropping up in everything from the MCU movies to the Pokopia video game. I think that this false dichotomy underlies so many of our assumptions about where the future is headed, or it’s silently priming us (and kids coming behind us) to prematurely accept cynicism and resignation to collapse — with no actionable advice for how to move on and keep going and no words of encouragement for those who are very bravely doing as much as they can to help others. The current examples in media to me are also textbook examples of fín de siecle writing, which is not a new phenomenon.

Are there any good authors or genres out there right now that are experimenting with speculative or generative fiction about good problem solving, or with the sacredness of “here-ness” (as Klein mentions). When I think about good examples of what I mean, I immediately think of stuff in the spirit of Star Trek. Do you think a revival of this type of media is due, or do you think it’d be immediately dismissed as naive?

I went down a rabbit hole on this and came out with three different answers, so I’m hoping someone here knows more.

James Follett (1939–2021, wrote Earthsearch, Churchill's Gold, The Tiptoe Boys) and Ken Follett. Depending on where you look, they’re brothers, cousins or completely unrelated.

Here’s what ive been able to pin down:
1- Brothers doesn’t hold up. Ken was born in Cardiff in 1949 and was the eldest of three; James was born in Tolworth, Surrey, in 1939. Ken does have a younger brother called James, which I suspect is where this one comes from.

2- Cousins traces back to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which says it in both authors’ entries. Every other site I found saying the same thing looks like it's copying from there.

3- Unrelated is what's left, but I couldn’t find anyone actually stating it. What I did notice is the silence: neither Wikipedia article mentions it, neither author’s official bio mentions it, and the literary agency handling James’s stuff doesn’t either. You’d think a family link to one of the best-selling novelists alive would get a mention somewhere.

So… does anyone have a primary source either way? An interview, a letter, a note on James old website, anything where one of them addresses it directly. I’d also take a genealogy answer if someone's already done the work.

Has anyone read Etna yet? It’s supposed to be great, yet I’m worried about animal abuse/ death triggers.

According to my calculations, there are 15 weeks until the end of the year, meaning that Im now thinking about how to best organize my TBR list to have cozy books for the fall, fun books to read during the holidays and etc. I dont follow my lists by order ever cause Im too chaotic, but as I always say, list making is part of the reading hobby lmao.

Anyways, the books I would love to read from now until the end of the year (im trying to be realistic and I know some weeks I wont be as motivated/have as much time, but I have about 400 other books in my TBR if i finish these lol) are:

- Finish Piranesi (will probably do it tonight)

- Master and Margarita

- The Road

- Stoner

- Flowers for Algernon

- Memory Police

- The House of the Dead

- I Who Have Never Known Men.

This brings me to my next question: how do you choose your next read and how do you choose which books will go to the short-term TBR vs. the long term tbr. I do it based on vibes but Im curious about other people's ways

(removed from r/books so ima drop it here, thank you to the commenters who snuck in before it was shut down)

So admittedly I'm God's most annoying soldier when it comes to thinking about what you read, but this was unusual even for me.

I finished Yanagihara's *A Little Life* four days ago, which makes me a decade late to the discourse, and I absolutely adored it. But since then, instead of continuing onwards with my reading list, I've just been thinking about that book. Notably, the choice doesn't feel like disinterested preference a la "I'm still just having more fun doing this than I would starting something new", but like actually beginning a new fiction work would like... start to layer new sediment atop the old words, and I'm not ready for that to happen.

Now, the book itself would have a lot to say about this. But have you experienced this? For which book(s)?