Book Review 2014: The Circle
Book #2
Still haven’t figured out that picture resizing thing guys. Sorry, but not really. I’m just a douche, aren’t I?
Next up in my Reading Challenge for 2014 was Dave Eggars The Circle. This was my second Eggars book, the first being A Hologram for the King, which I read last year. While I enjoyed both, Hologram is the stronger of the two for a variety of reasons.
That being said, The Circle is a lot of fun, especially since it pokes fun at one or more of the major Silicon Valley companies (ahem, Google). I currently live in San Francisco so find it particularly amusing.
The book follows Mae Holland, a young woman a couple years out of undergrad who ditches her dead end job for a slightly less dead end customer service job at the up and coming Circle. She got the job through a college friend who happens to be pretty high up on the chain, which affords her friend celebrity status within the company. Mae starts off feeling grateful for the opportunity, yet overwhelmed by the constant barrage of social media notifications, both stemming from internal and external networks. She struggles to find a balance between her personal desire for private enjoyments and the need to keep up. When she finds out the company will fully cover her parents’ medical care, which is a huge expense due to her father’s illness, she devotes more and more of herself to the company, which winds up having far-reaching effects.
The Good: What worked well for this book is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously and there’s no terrifying message at the end about how the world is going to end. It pokes fun at users freely giving up their privacy rights, but it is so over the top that it is clearly making fun. However, I do have to say that I felt a bit weirded out when Google bought Nest shortly after I’d finished reading this book. In the book, the Circle buys all sorts of companies that will enable it to track personal data, including fitness and health information. The Nest purchase almost had me shouting, “No! Privacy isn’t theft!” (that would probably make more sense if you read the book or understood what a Nest is). Other than that, I found it to be engaging and entertaining. I definitely ignored people for a day or two while I finished it.
The Not So Good: It’s just a bit too silly. Eggers also spends a lot of time building up the various social networking sites Mae has to use, which got a bit dull. It also struggled to find a place between being a story about a young lady and being a full on dystopian novel. There were times where Eggers tries to get us into Mae’s head and other times he ditches her and uses her only as a vehicle to carry out the “privacy as theft” portion of the story. The whole book would have felt a lot more solid if he had stuck with one or the other, or at least hadn’t abandoned Mae so quickly. However, I didn’t really get the sense that Eggers was going for a masterful novel, just something to get the point across. Overall I’d say it’s a worthwhile read as long as it’s not taken too seriously.
