Reading List
Ayelet Waldman
Novelist and Essayist
Ayelet Waldman is an Israeli-American novelist and essayist who spent three years as a federal public defender before turning to fiction, and whose legal work still shows in her novels. She wrote the Mommy-Track mystery series, several other novels, and the essays on motherhood that made her, briefly and unwillingly, a subject of national argument. Her reading taste runs to books about regret and the lives people fail to have.
01
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro · 1990 · Fiction
“How could a list of books about missed chances and self-defeat be complete without The Remains of the Day? Every time I reread this novel, I find myself in a frustrated (yet delighted) fury about how Stevens was so determined to sabotage any chance of happiness that he couldn't even allow himself to imagine a future with Miss Kenton.” — Source, May 2026
02
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Old Filth
by Jane Gardam · 2004
“Here's another favorite, also permeated by regret! The hero (such as he is) looks back on a painful childhood and a life characterized in no small part by disappointment. Though he is a successful barrister and judge, Sir Edward Feathers' nickname, derived from "Failed In London Try Hong Kong," sums up his life: This book, though melancholic, is leavened by Gardam's mordant wit.” — Source, May 2026
03
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Atonement
by Ian McEwan · 2001
“This is also a book about regret, and about shame. It is, like Persuasion, about the need to rewrite history, to expiate one's mistakes.” — Source, May 2026
04
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Persuasion
by Jane Austen · 1817
“Persuasion is my favorite of Jane Austen's novels, though we have been informed sternly by no less a luminary than Nabokov that Mansfield Park is the "greatest," whatever that means. Though Anne Elliot could be accused of being retiring and easily manipulated, there is an element of steel in her character that I love. Also, the book is about longing and regret, and in looking at this list I see that these are emotions I seem obsessed with.” — Source, May 2026