We can read it for you wholesale

Updated: 9th January 2026

[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. The name is taken from Philip K Dick’s We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, later adapted for the cinema (twice) as 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.

Ongoing commentaries:

Recently finished:

Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris

Best reads of 2025:
James—Percival Everett, and The Great Gatsby, which I reread last summer for the first time in years.

Other recent reads—and some notable things from the past couple of years or so:
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, which won the International Booker Prize in 2023.
The Old Curiosity Shop—Charles Dickens
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay—Elena Ferrante
Pigeon English–Stephen Kelman
Demon Copperhead—Barbara Kingsolver
Afterlives—Abdulrazah Gurnah
Small Things Like These—Claire Keegan
Still Life by Sarah Winman
Against the Loveless World—Susan Abulhawa
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