This book continues my trend of giving 5 stars to books I hated. Why, you might ask, would you give 5 stars to a book you swore heavily at and threw across the room upon completion? Because I hated it for all the right reasons: Eggers is a manipulative writer. He wants me to be uncomfortable, to think long and hard about the echoing ramifications of this plot. It made me feel things; they weren’t pleasant things, but the book went above and beyond […]
A Worthy Tribute
I’m a huge fan of Ray Bradbury, but I actually found this in the process of hunting down a copy of Joe Hill’s By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain, which is included in this collection. Pretty much every story here is a winner, though, and definitely worth reading for Bradbury fans. Here’s a full list of everything included. I particularly enjoyed Lee Martin’s Cat on a Bad Couch, Jacqueline Mitchard’s Two Of A Kind, Charles Yu’s Earth: (A Gift Shop) and Julia Keller’s Hayleigh’s Dad. Overall, though, there aren’t any duds. And I really liked […]
Frantic Avoidance
As a piece of art, I have to give it to Dave Eggers. AHBWOSG is carefully composed, wonderfully constructed, funny, poignant, and moving. But it’s also a pile of emotional bullshit that took me ages to read, and I couldn’t get away from it fast enough once I had inhaled the last intentionally-breakneck run-on paragraph. I have now moved on, immediately and purposefully, to “Men Explain Things to Me.” But back to the “Staggering Genius,” which is a memoir, slightly fictionalized, as Eggers explains […]
So Close to Awesome
The Circle by Dave Eggers, is an interesting, if slightly obvious premise. A clear play on the power of the major players in the social media and technology business (google, Facebook etc.), the Circle is a look at the terrifying possibility of a total global takeover by these companies, and how it could happen with the general consent of the people. The story focuses on Mae Holland, a recent graduate who lands a coveted entry level position working for the Circle, a major technology firm that got its […]
How ’bout we just keep this particular Circle broken?
I read The Circle back in August while on a family vacation in San Francisco/Silicon Valley. Needless to say this made Dave Egger’s exploration of life and culture in a dystopian, data-centric near-future all the more depressing. Mae Holland is thrilled when a good friend from college recruits her to come to work at The Circle. Mae starts at the bottom, as a call center customer service rep who fields calls from world-wide clients to help make sure their experience of Circle products and services […]
The Circle is trying to be your friend. Don’t let it.
It was my friend A’s turn to pick our month’s Book Club selection, and she went with The Circle. I’d never read Dave Eggers before (though A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius has been languishing on my shelf for a few years now), but I was highly curious about the premise. After reading it, I can only say: WOW. Our digital world is scary. Mae is naive, impressionable, and eager to please. She gets a job at The Circle, a social media networking corporation, through […]