Neil Hopcroft

Some time ago I tried to write about what I thought was wrong with fiction. Reading the The Science of Storytelling has given me some more insight into that, so I’m going to try again, with a little more knowledge. There are a few parts to it, mostly I think it comes down to there […]

[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] Idoru by William Gibson This book revolves around Rez, the lead singer of the Lo/Rez pop group, with two main story arcs following Chia, a fan club member from Seattle, and Laney, a quantitative analyst of data. Both brought to Tokyo because of rumours of the marriage of Rez with Rei […]

[Read aloud to Adelle] We’ll prescribe you another cat by Syou Ishida Following on from We’ll prescribe you a cat, this book explores the additional benefit gained from having access to more than one cat. The Nakagyo Kokoro Clinic for the Soul remains elusive and can only be found by those in need of the […]

[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 […]

[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 […]