Neil Hopcroft

We’ll prescribe you a cat by Syou Ishida [Read aloud to Adelle] It seems there is quite a collection of Japanese cat books, this one is again a fiction, following the story of a mysterious clinic and some the patients that visit it. They each find the clinic through hearsay and approach when they have […]

[Audiobook] Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Drury Clark While the author describes this as an informal history and claims to write for a general audience, I found this was stretching my, admittedly somewhat rusty, O-level chemistry knowledge – his idea of the level of education of ordinary people may show […]

[Read aloud to Adelle] Virtual Light by William Gibson I’m really enjoying rereading Gibsons works, this one doesn’t have quite the same ground breaking feel as Neuromancer. It is set in in a similar dystopia where society has fractured with the extinction of the middle class. The poor get by living in shanty towns built […]

[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 […]