Neil Hopcroft

[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 […]

[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 […]

[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 […]