Goodreads Mobile | see what your friends are reading

Aug 28, 2010

Caris rated it:

I feel that it would be wise to make a distinction here. The first half of the book gets five stars. The second half, including the American Psycho-esque “Liner Notes,” gets three, tops.

I found myself in disbelief as I progressed through the second half of the book. When I started, I was in love. Lethem had created his meaningful, heartfelt work that, I feel, would resonate with almost anyone. In the second half, though, it degraded. And quickly. Rather than focus on the character st More...

29 comments like (18 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Rachel rated it:

I finally finished this thing. It's pretty good, but the first half is so much better than the second half. There is some real magic amidst the nostalgia in Lethem's story of growing up in Brooklyn in the '70s. But the whole beginning seems like it's leading up to some great climax, and that climax never comes. As the main character grows up (an exaggeration for the emotionally underdeveloped thirtysomething he is by the end), he becomes a wanky, self-absorbed snob-rock geek, which may have been More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Adam rated it:

This was just annoying from start to finish. Lethem is exactly the kind of literary self-hating misanthrope that I want nothing to do with.

This was recommended to me because I'm a big fan of superheroes (in comics, in literature &c) and its conceit revolved around the idea of boys who read comics getting their own super-powers.

It's not original at all to take the superhero myth and give it a profoundly negative, misanthropic spin. It's not insightful to point out that 'in More...

4 comments like (8 people liked it)

Jan 29, 2012

Dennis rated it:

Midway through:
Fortress has been sitting on my shelf for over a year. A recent trip (just returned) to NYC, Manhattan, and a dip of the toe into Brooklyn (DUMBO and W'Burg mostly) helped elevate this book to the top of the list. Hours of plane time from the left to right coast and back again makes for some serious reading time. Indeed, Fortress has thus far lived up to it's reputation, both among GoodReaders and the Lit World in general.

Finished: The second half was in fact be More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Tom rated it:

Fuck you and your MacArthur prize! You should use the money to pay us for reading your drivel!!

5 comments like (6 people liked it)

Sep 22, 2007

Garth rated it:

"First, a confession: I approached Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude with high expectations--not impossibly high, but perhaps high enough to bias my reaction to the novel. I first learned that a new Lethem book was forthcoming from a contributor’s note in Harper’s, where Lethem this spring published a wonderful essay on the nearly forgotten critic Edward Dahlberg. I added “The Fortress of Solitude-September” to the weird little list I keep of titles to look out for. Then, toward th More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Dec 18, 2010

Nancy rated it:

Well, I finished it yesterday. And it took a great deal. I'm not quite sure how I feel, but I will be changing my rating from 5 to lower. Sadly.

I absolutely admire Lethem's writing and eagerly read his works. Sadly, I was left with a great number of thoughts after Fortress, some of which were not all too positive.

First, Part I was excellent. EXCELLENT. I absolutely loved it. The details were rich, the story poignant, the vantage point incredible. He started a the More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jun 21, 2007

Ben rated it:

Lethem seems, as Jonathan Franzen reportedly was while writing The Corrections, to have been trying to write The Great American Novel when he wrote this book. The result was a pretty jumbled, sprawling, and overreaching attempt to shoehorn race, gentrification, obscure pop cultural obsessions, and magic realism (via superhero comic book characters and allusions) into a novel. The settings and descriptions often felt very research-derived, as if Lethem boldly ignored the whole "write what yo More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Clark rated it:

What a shit storm. This is one of the more plodding books I have engaged in my time as a reader. It ranks up there with one of the only other books I have abandoned, Updike's Rabbit, Run. Updike and Lethem also hold the distinction of being some of the worst writers of prose I have encountered. My god, I hate the way they write.

Not recommended.

3 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jun 12, 2008

Colin rated it:

Storytelling has changed.

It used to be that stories unfolded slowly, sometimes even lethargically, until rising to the climactic finish. Think about the classics you like—most likely: slow start, strong finish. These days, stories begin at a rapid pace, but seem to lose momentum by the end. When I think about recent popular titles, even ones I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, this disappointment is usually present. Maybe it’s the immediacy of the modern-day culture, but it’s rare to find an e More...

4 comments like (6 people liked it)

Feb 15, 2008

AC rated it:

This gorgeous, sprawling novel is difficult to peg, but to capsulate, it is the first instance of grunge magic realism I’ve come across. Lethem starts off with and fitfully returns to gritty realism, but veers repeatedly into some private dreamlike boyhood place where magic rings enable flight and invisibility. The narrative shifts so often that every chapter may be in a new person’s voice, and one has to pause to tease out the clues of who is speaking. There are no superheroes in these pages More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 10, 2008

Christina Stind rated it:

Dylan moves into black Brooklyn and does his best to survive while being picked on for being the only white kid. He befriends Mingus, the black kid who comes to rule the street and the two remains friends throughout.
I loved the story of growing up in Brooklyn and how graffiti, drugs etc was all part of daily life - nothing big. It is a bit scary, however, how everybody seem to have their roles cut out for them - and it seems clear from the start who ends up in jail and who ends up as a mid More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Logan rated it:

A fantastic coming-of-age tale set in mid-to-late 1970s Brooklyn. Two motherless boys grow up next door to one another: Mingus Rude, son of an R&B singer, and Dylan Ebdus, son of a University Professor, grow up together on their block following first their passion for comic books (the title is drawn from the name of Superman's secret base in the Arctic) and later their love of graffiti and hip-hop. First and foremost a tale of friendship's makings and falling apart, Lethem also adds a healthy More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Sep 15, 2007

Shaun rated it:

Phenomenal. A brilliant character study, with an engagingly intertwining story, and just a hint of magical realism. In fact the quotient of magical realism doesn't even become revealed as magical until towards the final quarter of the book. (Of course, I may be biased - I live near where the book takes place, so I thoroughly enjoyed the descriptions of places I know well, as they were in the 70s. When a scene takes place in the Walt Whitman Projects, and you can turn around and see this obscure More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 06, 2009

Meredith rated it:

I feel like the ending really saved this book for me. I found the beginning interesting, but had a hard time working through the middle. The race relations in this story seemed very nebulous and conflicted; I may be reading too much into it, but it seemed like the author spoke through Dylan, who was continuously coping with or processing his childhood in a predominantly black neighborhood of Brooklyn. This was a process that never seemed to have a resolution, and I couldn't figure out if this wa More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 04, 2009

Jonathan rated it:

The first half of this book is the best thing I've read in years. The stories of Dylan Ebdus growing up in Brooklyn, dealing with racism and graffiti and superpowers, were amazing. I couldn't put the book down. I loved it.

But then the timeline jumps forward into the 90s. Instead of a shy middle-school student, or a punk poseur teenager, Dylan is a whiny rock journalist in 1999. That's not the book I want to read. I don't care about his problems with his girlfriend or efforts to More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 25, 2011

Margot rated it:

I enjoyed the sprawling narrative and Lethem's scrawling, graffiti-esque effects of language. I also appreciated the hyper meta-cognition of social interactions bestowed on Dylan Ebdus (and other children-forced-to-grow-up-too-soon) as a boy by the first section's omniscient narrator. He is able to fathom the broader meaning and context of the constant hassling he encounters as a whiteboy in Brooklyn, as if seeing these petty infractions from the heights of aerial flight attributed to Aeroman.
More...

0 comments like

Aug 03, 2011

Amanda rated it:

It's too bad I'm not obsessed with music, comic books, or graffiti. If I were, I would probably have liked this book more. I can appreciate how well written it is, and how astute Lethem's social and psychological observations can be, but appreciation wasn't enough to make this an enjoyable read. I should say I read plenty of stuff I don't enjoy for school and work, and that's okay with me, but when I read something that has nothing to do with school or work I want to enjoy it. Instead of which, More...

0 comments like

Jun 05, 2011

Elizabeth rated it:

I really, really liked this book. I have read the criticisms and the negative reviews on this site, and I actually agree with many of them. The second half is worse than the first half. It even took me a while for me to pick it back up after a hiautus. Maybe it was overreaching.

This book has really stayed with me, though. The protagonist's struggles are so real, and his friendships accurately depict childhood fickleness and change. The "supernatural" elements are subt More...

0 comments like

Mar 05, 2011

Kasandra rated it:

I really liked parts of this so much they were 5 stars, but really didn't like other parts and would have given 1 star, so the 3 is a balance of reactions. I liked this with a lot of reservations. My favorite parts: certain descriptions of growing up in the 70s as a white kid in a mostly poor urban black neighborhood were right on, from the music to the lingo to the street games to the local made-up jingles about cheap sneakers. His: "Rejects, they make your feet feel fine, rejects, they co More...

0 comments like

Feb 28, 2011

Alexis rated it:

I would give this ten stars if I could.

The writing is masterful, with metaphors chosen not just for accuracy and not just for poetry but also because they chime a reference to some other imagery or idea elsewhere in the book. ::SPOILERS MAYBE?:: Two characters experience body dismorphism in mirrored ways--it's just a note, a hundred pages apart. And I love the description of Dylan feeling small, comparing it to when he was younger "the ailanthus branches brushing the back windo More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 22, 2011

Bret rated it:

i really like this book, but it wasn't particularly engaging right off the bat. after reading a run of detective novels, it took a while to adjust to a style that doesn't do anything to hook you into turning the page and rewards a slower reading pace. its mostly about a boy who grows up in brooklyn in the 70s and early 80s. we don't get much recounting of the boy's life in straightforward biographic detail. instead the author dwells on certain instances or moments without a lot of context, and t More...

0 comments like

Feb 06, 2011

Juliana rated it:

I read the first line and was smitten. I thought: Here is a writer that will take some time to craft a scene with such thoughtful detail, cast it so carefully in such a particularly chosen light, that I will be in the scene too. I see it! I know what he means! Yes yes yes!! Ah... So I was excited to be confronted with such a book.

Dylan is not quite ready for First Grade when you meet him, living with his radical mom and artist dad in a not-yet-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood. It's More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 05, 2011

Andy rated it:

I couldn't make it all the way through this one. I read about the first 200 pages, not even half the book, and according to the other reviews I've seen on GoodReads, that's the good half. There are certainly things to admire here. For one, it's completely different from "Motherless Brooklyn," and I have to credit any author who can comfortably inhabit such different literary territory. The writing is also good; it evokes the time and place and the characters as well as can be.

More...

0 comments like

Dec 07, 2010

Osvaldo rated it:

Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude struggles with race and identity with an eager abandon that is as courageous as it is problematic. It explores the hybridity of urban culture unafraid of contradiction or to leave the knots of meaning it examines tangled. I am simultaneously discomforted and refreshed by what seems to me to be an honest white voice taking on race in America, a voice full of conflict, guilt and resentment.

I loved this book and was challenged by it more this time th More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 18, 2010

Agent Zero rated it:

Immaginate che l'Anello del Potere, sì, come quello bramato da Sauron, finisca nelle mani di un ragazzino bianco di Brooklyn, di un quartiere nero di Brooklyn, Gowanus.
Ora immaginate come possa svilupparsi la trama di un romanzo che ha per protagonista un ragazzino bianco di Gowanus con l'Anello del Potere, figlio di un artista eremita e di una figlia dei fiori convinta che la miglior scuola sia la strada, anche se la strada è quella degli anni settanta di Gowanus, tra Baseball, fumetti, a More...

0 comments like

Jun 12, 2010

Gordon rated it:

This book is so much better than its name.

The format of The Fortress of Solitude is interesting in itself, as Lethem's work divides into three parts: a first-person narrative of a boy growing up in Brooklyn, from stickball to the split worlds of punk rock and graffiti; second, a piece of music criticism done by the narrator when he is older, lasting only a handful of pages; and, finally, another story about the boy (now a man) with a hint of supernatural heroism.

I loved t More...

0 comments like

Apr 07, 2010

Patrick rated it:

I half expected to find that Jonathan Lethem is one of those authors that readers either love or hate, but was surprised by how mad the people who hate him are. Personally, I fall into the former camp - those who love Mr. Lethem's work. Let me explain why.

Jonathan Lethem creates the most absurd scenarios possible and then crafts ingenious narratives around them. To describe a book like Fortress of Solitude to someone not already familiar with Mr. Lethem's work requires a lot of qu More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 03, 2010

Nate's rated it:

I read through most of the holiday too. There's a part in the book I'm reading (Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem) about a kid that goes around with an El Marko in his jacket lining so he can tag places in the city. It went into a little bit of why a kid would want to write graffiti and the kind of culture of it. I don't know if there really is a culture, but that would endear them to me more. I've always felt like graffiti artists and I were kindred spirits. They have an interest in font More...

0 comments like

Dec 06, 2009

Sunshine rated it:

genius with language. just gorgeous use of language, rhythm, structure, it thrilled me as I read.

also, a voice that couldn't be put down. i read through this fat book with my eyes glued. relatable on so many levels, at least for this reader.
inside/outside of multiple worlds. invisible/visible. confusion/self-denigration. grief/loss. mapping, making invisible visible, through language and through journeys. guilt/escape.

also, boy/male friendship.

a More...

0 comments like