Top 10 books about forgetting

Sam Taylor is the former pop culture correspondent for the Observer. His new novel, The Amnesiac, tells the story of James Purdew, a man obsessed with uncovering the events of three years of his life about which he remembers nothing.

He named his top 10 books about forgetting for the Guardian.

Number two on his list:

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale by Philip K Dick

Not a novel (though I could just as easily have chosen A Scanner Darkly or Valis or Time Out of Joint, to name a few), this is the fifth volume of Dick's collected short stories, and contains two almost perfect examples of the amnesia genre: The Electric Ant, in which a man discovers that he is not a man; and the title story, which was made into the hit movie Total Recall. One puzzling but apt feature of Dick's stories is that it is very difficult to remember their plots even a few weeks after reading them.

Before you forget, click over and read about Taylor's chart-topper.

--Marshal Zeringue