Neil Hopcroft

[Read aloud to Adelle] The Cat who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa This is another gentle Japanese cat story, following the story of Rintaro, a high school student who is left bereft by the death of his beloved grandfather, a reclusive owner of a second hand bookshop. Rintaro is moping around in the bookshop one […]

[Read while waiting for appointments] All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland Coupland is generally easy reading for me, with rambling sentence structures that flow with the consciousness and ordinary seeming characters getting themselves into extraordinary relationships with each other and the world in general. He holds a mirror up to show the darkness of […]

[Read aloud to Adelle] Islands of Abandonment – Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn When I bought this book the woman behind the till told me to look out for the cows, they’re amazing. She wasn’t wrong. This book is a tour of sites abandoned by humans, left for nature to reclaim because […]

[Read aloud to Adelle] John Dies at the End by David WongJason Pargin. I got this book because I heard about the narrative style and it intrigued me. Indeed it lived up to my hopes with its breathless insanity – David is quite squarely an unreliable narrator, prone to exaggeration and digression, but also unrelenting […]

[Read aloud to Adelle] Healing Hands, The Amazing True Story of a Spirit Doctor [available on archive.org] by J Bernard Hutton We went to visit a spirit doctor in Birmingham, the ill-fated journey that brought us A Fools Wisdom and a new scratch on the side of the car, and bought this book about George […]

[Audiobook] Failure is not an Option by Gene Kranz It turns out that failure was an option, on my part at least. This was included for a limited time as a free title in my Audible subscription. I didn’t make it to the end before the time was up. Apollo 13 did come home, which […]

The Island House by Mary Considine [Read aloud to Adelle] We picked up this book during our recent holiday in Cornwall, wanting to know more about what life in the county is like. This book chronicles the life of a London couple who want to drop out of city life. They get an agreement from […]

[Audiobook, listened on the way to meet a spirit doctor] A Fools Wisdom by Steven Young This is a terrible book. DO. NOT. WASTE. YOUR. TIME! Hiding somewhere within these pages (waveforms) there is a germ of a good idea. The author manages to trample that good idea by riding roughshod over it with a […]

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 […]