We can read it for you wholesale

Updated 12th February 2023

[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:
The Promise—Damon Galgut
Barnaby Rudge—Charles Dickens

Some recent reads, latest first:

Bad Actors—Mick Herron
Elena Knows—Claudia Piñeiro
Grey Bees—Andrey Kurkov
The Vanishing Half—Brit Bennett
Circe—Madeline Miller
The Story of a New name—Elena Ferrante
The Hummingbird—Sandro Veronesi
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