Neil Hopcroft

[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 […]

[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 […]

This book is a whirlwind tour of all the threats posed to the human race, examining in turn technological, political, natural, scientific and philosophical threats to mankind. It would be easy for this to be a depressing book, but somehow it manages to remain reasonably upbeat, even given its premise that there is a good […]

This is a collection of stories about business failures, they vary in length from a couple of paragraphs to about 20 pages, so there is quite a lot of easy to dip into reading. I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t much in the way of analysis of *why* they were failures, rather just […]

I first picked up this book because of its title. But reading the back of it, it became clear it was a book about Britains relationship with the European Union rather than one examining liberty in Britain. Still a subject about which I am under-informed, so worth a read I thought. It was soon evident […]

With thanks to Grandi for this book. This is an utterly fantastic book, it is written as a series of emails and text messages mostly from Martin, the marketing director of a global conglomerate, to his colleagues and family, but, where pertinant, mails he receives too. It follows his life for a year, during what […]

I like Gibsons writing. This book took me a little while to get into, but by the time I did I found it an absorbing read. It is quite a departure from what I consider his normal work, being set more or less in current time. It follows the life of Cayce Pollard and her […]