Everyone loves their dog.

Not to mention their momma.

About a month ago there was a kerfuffle about how Jeff Bezos put The Remains of the Day on his favorite books list. This is actually old news but got some attention because, I think, of a reference to this fact in Jennifer Szalai’s review of Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment. Anyway.

I thought this was pretty funny at the time for a few reasons—but mostly because Ishiguro is an incredibly popular novelist, and Remains of the Day is not only one of, if not the, most popular of his books (in addition to being a popular movie). Of course lots of people are going to read and enjoy him. It’s not hypocrisy or stupidity to enjoy art and be a bad person (or a person who is responsible for on the whole bad things in the world). It’s treating art as something that exists in a different sphere from business, which is what most people do, albeit in ways that are less extreme.

I was reminded of this (again) when my friend Bradley Babendir pointed out this list of books Goodreads marked as “readers also e…