Neil Hopcroft

[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 […]

[Hardcover, read aloud to Adelle and Nils] Skandar and the Chaos Trials This is the third book in the Skandar series, a series we have been enjoying so far. They are set in a fantasy world where unicorns are found to be real and have magical powers when teamed up with a rider. They are […]

[Listened as audiobook] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/205067/overdiagnosed-by-h-gilbert-welch This is a book about overdiagnosis of medical conditions, it digs in to the problems of screening and some implications of discovery of “incidental-oma”s, growths seen on a scan but unrelated to the reason for the scan, and other incidental findings. This book has put into perspective some of the things […]

The Last London [Read aloud to Adelle] I got this book because we were reading London Orbital, Sinclairs book about a walk around London in the acoustic footprint of the M25 and didn’t want it to finish. More about that book later. This was a tricky read, with complex sentences that didn’t come out in […]

After reading this book a whole bunch of things start to make more sense. And I think I’m angry about that, but I’m not sure. He knows his market and he’s playing to their righteous indignation. This book is full of the kinds of things that make people angry about politicians but it doesn’t examine […]

I’m not entirely convinced I understand this book. Partly because I was a bit intermittent reading it so tended to lose the plot a bit, and partly because of its structure – there are basically two related storylines running forward and backward through the book, so everything keeps flipping around and my poor little head […]

This is the first in a series of brief, random and intermittent book reviews… Travels in Dreamland is a peculiar book about Area 51 and its relation to the UFO watching community in America. It describes the birth of the skunkworks, a fascinating and extremely intense lab/research department. There is also a lot of discussion […]