beckalette's review against another edition
3.0
Possibly the most exhausting read I have ever experienced! While I can admire the concept & the imagery, I couldn’t wait to be done with it!
daytonasplendor's review against another edition
4.0
"I'm thirty-eight, thirty-nine," she heard the mathematician say with his usual imprecision concerning personal statistics. He pulled back from the light of the candle on the table as though to hide behind his dark Indianness in the darkness of the room. "I look in the mirror sometimes," he said, "and I think I'm fifty or fifty-five." He shook his head. "I don't know how I got so damned tired. When I was younger I despised anyone who gave up so easily, but that was when the world sang to me, that was when there was a number for everything. I couldn't imagine I'd ever feel this old and this tired." Now he leaned into the light of the candle. "It isn't your fault. It isn't that you're unbeautiful, it isn't that you don't deserve what you want. The humiliation is mine, not yours. In a musicless moor at the end of a numberless world all I can manage now is to grieve for what I once felt and for how much I felt it. How is it I'm so old now and I don't hear the music anymore, I don't find the numbers anymore?"
austen_to_zafon's review against another edition
3.0
I recently came upon an old notebook with a couple of pages of handwritten one- or two-line reviews I wrote of all the books I read in 1989 and 90. Most of them I remember, but this one...it's like I never read it. I wrote "Surreal & futuristic story Los Angeles." No indication of whether I liked it or not, and I can't imagine what reason I had for reading it. I was kind of past my earlier years of sci fi binges and I was in college, overwhelmed with set reading. Huh. I doubt I'll re-read it to find out. One of life's little mysteries that just show me once again that I was a person I barely remember now.
rebus's review against another edition
2.5
There may be something here, but I'm certain that it's not worth the bother.
Erickson is just another boring and abstract author who prefers to play with words--which always bored me, as it is an abuse of language and not a delight--and honestly has nothing to say about humanity or the world (his characters are ciphers that are so thinly drawn that they make comic book characters look well developed).
Erickson is just another boring and abstract author who prefers to play with words--which always bored me, as it is an abuse of language and not a delight--and honestly has nothing to say about humanity or the world (his characters are ciphers that are so thinly drawn that they make comic book characters look well developed).
ania's review against another edition
4.0
I'm embarrassed to admit that for the entire time of reading I'd been thinking of Styx instead of Rubicon. The story made so much more sense to me then. Now I'm just confused.
I really enjoyed reading it though. Erickson's writing has the same quality I've always admired in Calvino — that of making everything into a tale that sounds familiar like a myth or a parable yet stays entirely unpredictable.
There's a circularity to the plot that I'm still trying to figure out.
I really enjoyed reading it though. Erickson's writing has the same quality I've always admired in Calvino — that of making everything into a tale that sounds familiar like a myth or a parable yet stays entirely unpredictable.
There's a circularity to the plot that I'm still trying to figure out.
ania's review
4.0
I'm embarrassed to admit that for the entire time of reading I'd been thinking of Styx instead of Rubicon. The story made so much more sense to me then. Now I'm just confused.
I really enjoyed reading it though. Erickson's writing has the same quality I've always admired in Calvino — that of making everything into a tale that sounds familiar like a myth or a parable yet stays entirely unpredictable.
There's a circularity to the plot that I'm still trying to figure out.
I really enjoyed reading it though. Erickson's writing has the same quality I've always admired in Calvino — that of making everything into a tale that sounds familiar like a myth or a parable yet stays entirely unpredictable.
There's a circularity to the plot that I'm still trying to figure out.
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