We can read it for you wholesale

Updated 21st February 2024

[The full list of books is in the right-hand panel, or under Menu in the phone app.]

Spoiler Alert! If you read any of these commentaries, you will find out everything about a book, because I stop every few chapters and write in detail about it all as I read. I’m not trying simply to remember the book, but to recreate the experience of reading it. Most of the books I read are novels, but not all of them.

The name is taken from Philip K Dick’s short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, later adapted for the cinema in Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. At the centre of the story is the unreliability of memory, which is why I started to write these commentaries in the first place.

What I’m reading now:
American Fiction, or ‘Erasure’—Percival Everett
Demon Copperhead—Barbara Kingsolver

Some recent reads:

Bad Actors—Mick Herron
Elena Knows—Claudia Piñeiro
Grey Bees—Andrey Kurkov
A Terrible Kindness—Jo Browning Wroe
The Trees—Percival Everett
What I’m reading now:
Little Dorrit—Charles Dickens
The Scapegoat—Daphne du Maurier
Small Things Like These—Claire Keegan
Klara and the Sun—Kazuo Ishiguro
English Pastoral—James Rebanks
Shuggie Bain—Douglas Stuart
Go Tell It on the Mountain—James Baldwin
The Catcher in the Rye—J D Salinger
Vanity Fair—William Makepeace Thackeray
Girl, Woman, Other—Bernadine Evaristo

Best recent read:
Hamnet—Maggie O’Farrell