Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Penelope Fitzgerald (1)

Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

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Offshore “‘Are we to gather that Dreadnought is asking us to do something dishonest?’ Richard asked.” I first read this book a few years ago in specifically addressing a desire to read all the Booker Prize winners. One of the issues with that task (other being kind of silly and useless) is that it puts some very very different books side by side as if there could be any kind of fair comparison among them. That’s true about the prize itself of course. It’s much harder […]

The Shop Around the Corner

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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CBR 11 Bingo – Not My Wheelhouse Halfway through this extremely short novel I was preparing the scathing review I was sure I was going to leave here. A comedy of manners without comedy, a too-precious by half story, the personification of the word “quaint.” All of these were phrases I was planning to deploy with devastating effectiveness. But then something happened. Not in the plot, although there is a slight story here, but in the effect the novel was having on me. Middle-aged widow […]

“What’s to become of us? We can’t go on like this.”

Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald

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I sometimes really like Penelope Fitzgerald novels and sometimes don’t. I didn’t particularly like her Booker Prize winning novel, Offshore, in part because it didn’t feel like an award winning novel in the ways that others from the prize absolutely do. I did however, really love her novel The Bookshop, and liked The Golden Child quite a bit. Some parts of this novel I like a lot. We are in Italy and dealing with the Ridolfi family, a historically connected Florentine family who, like a […]

Not the Eddie Murphy one

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This is not based on the weird ass Eddie Murphy movie from the mid 80s with that weird haunted sword or pipe or whatever it was. Instead this is a kind of mystery, kind of comedy of manners taking place in a Natural History museum the night before a huge new opening. In this novel, several key figures circulate around the opening of a new exhibit that will introduce the world to the collected findings about an ancient civilization: Garamantia. It has old burial vessels, […]

A few words about St. Angelicus

The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald

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Sigh. I should just come clean and explain myself here. It’s the end of the month, and I wanted to polish off a few more reviews before the close. Also, I have a few deadlines with work and I am writing about the least Mad Max book I have ever read while watching Mad Max with the dog. I wanted to like this book because of the four novels by Penelope Fitzgerald, I liked one of them a decent amount. I have two more to […]

Hers must have been the last generation to fall in love without hope in such an unproductive way…

Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald

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Penelope Fitzgerald is the most British name ever, and in ways, she’s the most British writer ever. She started publishing when she was about 60 and then went on to publish 9 novels after that. She won the Booker Prize in 1978 for her novel Offshore, which is mostly just ok. I read her novel, The Bookshop, about a woman opening up a bookshop in a small coastal town in 1959. The owner then overruns the town with copies of Lolita. It’s great. This novel is just ok. This […]



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