Neil Hopcroft

[Audiobook] Skunkworks by Ben R Rich I chose this book because I wanted to learn more about the Skunkworks, the secretive Lockheed R&D works based in Burbank. Ben Rich became the leader of the Skunkworks after Kelly Johnsons retirement – this book recounts stories of his time there. The character of the place changed with […]

[Read to self] Climate Change, how we can get to carbon zero, by Bianca Nogrady This was a book I picked up at the Eden Project in the knowledge that I was going to finish Neverwhere while we were in Cornwall. This is a bit of a weird book, on one level it is a […]

The Cat with Three Passports by CJ Fentiman [Read aloud to Adelle] This book starts, as many books about Japan do, with English speakers landing a job teaching the language in a foreign country. After a false start in Osaka they return to find teaching jobs in a small town in the mountains. They accidentally […]

[Audiobook] The Broken Rung – When the career ladder breaks for women and how they can succeed in spite of it by Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee and Maria del mar Martinez. I was trying to find a business book written by a woman – there seems to be a huge collection of books about how […]

[Read aloud to Adelle] Fishing in Utopia, Sweden and the Future that Disappeared This book rewinds to before our time in Sweden and describes a country we hardly recognise. There are some familiar aspects, of course, a lot of it revolves around the quintessence of Swedishness, that acceptance of others but only as long as […]

Warning: this book contains sadness, a lot of sadness. It is treated gently but that does not stop it being sad. There is also a lot of joy, with many memories of childhood friends and rekindling of relationships. [Read aloud to Adelle] – The Travelling Cat Chronicles This is a gentle story about a young […]

Neverwhere [Paperback, read to self] I chose this book as my companion for my adventures at the hospital last September – it has been slow progress because it has accompanied me to medical appointments of various sorts since then, for which the waiting times have left little reading time. Of this, I am grateful. I […]

[Hardback – read aloud to Adelle] Lords of the North [wikipedia] is a historical novel by Bernard Cornwell. We have previously read another of his books, I think one later in this series, War Lord, which I found myself bogged down in – that was just shy of a thousand pages. This was a much […]

[audiobook] Navigate any Situation, Lead with Confidence and Create an Impact at Work. https://www.mikebechtle.com/books/how-to-read-a-room/ I got this audiobook with the aim of understanding a bit more about what is going on in meetings of various sorts. I had forgotten, at the time, that I don’t actually attend meetings that much any more, so I’m not […]

[Audiobook] Skin in the Game, Hidden Asymmetries in Everyday Life, is a book about the meaning and value of risk taking. The main premise being that for risk taking to have any value there must be some downside for the risk taker. If you have no Skin in the Game, you have no place to […]