We can read it for you wholesale

Updated: 3rd June 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:

Oliver Twist, my annual reading of a Dickens novel. I’m half-way through—watch this space for further monthly posts
All That Man Is by David Szalay
Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut, a fictionalised biography of E M Forster during the years of his sexual and emotional awakening.
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (2024), set in the Big Freeze in Britain in 1962-3. Half-way through, as Part 1 comes to an end, the snow has just arrived….

Recently finished:
One Lost Soul by J M Dalgliesh

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:
Freya by Anthony Quinn
Gliff by Ali Smith
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante
Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris
Demon Copperhead—Barbara Kingsolver
The Persian Boy by Mary Renault
Small Things Like These—Claire Keegan
Pure by Andrew Miller
Against the Loveless World—Susan Abulhawa
You Are Here by David Nicholls
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