We can read it for you wholesale

Updated: 21st December 2025—so the days are getting longer in the northern hemisphere

[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: Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, which won the International Booker Prize in 2023. In the summer I re-read The Great Gatsby for the first time in years, and I’m impressed all over again. If you haven’t read it for a while, do yourself a favour and spend a few hours in a writing masterclass.

Best recent reads:
James—Percival Everett, and The Great Gatsby, obviously

Other recent reads—and some notable things from the past couple of years or so:
The Invention of Morel—Adolfo Bioy Casares
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