The Circle

Loved it. Easy to read as always with Eggers. Read it in about 2 days. Chilling and very topical

Started this on audiobook, listened for ~15min and then just had to stop, because it felt it was written for people who know 0 about the tech/digital world.

I think Eggers is probably prophetic when he alludes to the Googleization of the world.

It was OK. Didn't delve into the major issues with social media as much as I wanted.

Very very simplified version of an old and tired tale, big company controls all the worlds info. Sadly, the book falls very short on delivering any new ideas around this topic and drags you along for what feels like ages only to leave you exactly where you started. Would not recommend.

Rating: 3.5 stars

flat, unlikable main character, banal prose (sparse but not in an exciting way, just seemed like he couldn't think of the words), sex scenes were gross and weird (the ones that were meant to be good were the same as the ones meant to be bad). plot was flat, predictable, unoriginal, hamfisted etc. etc.
shit sucks.

Very late to this party, but I found the book very entertaining and creepy as hell.

It's a thriller. I was on the edge of my seat. It was scary.

I thought this was an interesting concept, and I liked the “cultish” fashion the company embraced their employees (separating them from their family and friends) and brainwashing them (keeping them up with work and events, keeping them so busy with no time to think). The sex scenes were truly bad, and some of the writing was as well. It was a bit predictable, but I still felt compelled to listen to the end.

Look, I kind of get what Dave was trying to do here, and it's very clever but this book just TRIES SO HARD. I don't think it helped that the humour totally went over my head, I think as someone who suffers from anxiety the scenes where Mae is frantically trying to get her ratings up just didn't resonate.l and I just despaired at the deliberately awful sex scenes. The characters veer from Mae being impossibly naive and totally gaslit by the company to her former boyfriend who is annoyingly preachy. I think because we see things so much from Mae's point of view, the other characters are not really developed, and it can be quite easy to become wearied of her constant navel gazing and selfishness, which is hammered home at every opportunity. Instead of allowing the reader to come to their own conclusions, the author puts huge red lights around everything, signs pointing to where to laugh, where to feel shocked and where to marvel at his brilliance. It didn't have to be written in such a simplistic way, give the reader some credit. Honestly, though Infinite Jest is a complex behemoth and DFW is ‘problematic' to put it mildly, it's far more memorable in comparison.

Probably closer to 3.5 stars. A good companion to “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman. A good sci-fi book about the warnings of social media, monopolies, and information sharing. Not sure if it is too late already though, as many of us have already succumbed to it.

Meh. There's a lot I didn't like about this, aside from the issues raised by a totalitarian social network.

The sex scenes were bizarre and unnecessary, with lines like “...so deep she could feel his swollen crown somewhere near her heart,” and Mae daydreaming about how “She wanted to be back in that bathroom sitting on him, feeling the crown of him push through.” Bleh. I can't imagine a woman ever thinking about sex this way.

The dialog seemed largely interchangeable, so most characters working at the Circle could well have been the same person, Bailey seemed exactly the same as the people working at HR. Most of the plot was driven by pedantic dialog of some higher up person grilling Mae until she agrees that she was wrong, and the Circle is wonderful. Mae lacks any depth and just serves as a sponge to absorb the Circle's dogma.

Also, there's an allegory throughout the book involving a shark harvested from a deep sea exploration of the Mariana Trench, and they put it in an aquarium and watch it eat an increasingly weird selection of animals, sea horses, a tuna, an octopus, an entire sea turtle, for seemingly no reason. It's such a heavy handed metaphor for the Circle, which is annoying in it's own right, but also was so scientifically impossible that I just got frustrated every time they kept coming back to this stupid aquarium. You can't take a creature living in the conditions of the Mariana Trench, raise it to the surface, and then expect it to survive in a normal salt water coral filled fish tank.

I finished the book feeling entirely frustrated. The upside was that the audiobook narrator was excellent, and it did keep my interest well enough to want to finish it.

“Prophetic” is the most apt and eerie way to describe this book. Eggers creates a futuristic world that revolves around the campus of a company not unlike the Googles and Amazons and Facebooks of our day. ‘The Circle” has essentially monopolized the internet and created a culture best described as a “pics or it didn't happen” culture, calling out the danger of social media compressing our private lives until they cease to exist at all. Well-written and terribly thought-provoking, this book had me hesitating before my social media apps. Definitely worth a read.

I highly recommend reading this. Utopia and dystopia are some of my favourite genres, but reading this book, which is both fascinating and at the same time creepy, does not feel like reading about a dystopia, because we already have most of the technology necessary to build the “totalitarian nightmare” (as one of the characters calls it) installed by The Circle. We also already can see in our reality some aspects criticized by the book, the “fake friendships” via social network, the culture of oversharing every moment of our life to obsessively seek approval via likes and comments. And all of this is just the surface of the book, I will not write more detail about the plot and topics in order non to spoil stuff.

Regarding the pace, the first half of the book is quite slow-paced, but I encourage everyone to be patient and go through it; after the first half things start to become very interesting and scary.

This is another book about Google, but this time it's a horror story in the tradition of 1984 and A Brave New World.

Ketika Mae Holland diterima bekerja di The Circle, dia merasa telah diberikan kesempatan emas dalam hidupnya. The Circle merupakan perusahaan internet dan teknologi paling berkuasa di dunia. Mereka menyatukan akun penggunanya dengan surel pribadi, media sosial, internet banking, dan lainnya ke dalam sistem operasi mereka. Sehingga, satu pengguna hanya memiliki satu identitas dan satu akun universal. The Circle merevolusi transparansi dunia digital.
Akan tetapi, di balik itu, The Circle ingin masuk sepenuhnya ke semua aspek kehidupan manusia. Mereka berambisi mengawasi setiap langkah, merekam setiap percakapan, dan meneliti seluruh gerak gerik manusia. Di dunia yang telah terintegrasi dengan The Circle; privasi, rahasia, serta identitas anonim adalah kejahatan berat. The Circle perlahan berubah menjadi tiran yang mengontrol penuh hak dan kebebasan manusia.
Sesungguhnya aku mengharapkan suatu cerita yang bagus, mengingat sdh difilmkan & hamper 600 halaman. Namun aku di awal2 saja sdh merasa ngantuk & bosan dengan alur yg sangat lambat.

Sucked buttfarts, naive, ignorant, and poorly written. As if Dan Brown found a selfie stick and decided to write about internet/tech culture.

Interesting read. Too bad it was filled with body-shaming and ableism.

This was an interesting experience for me because I watched the movie first and then I read the book. So I was not expecting the ending of the book to be so different from the way the movie ended. I still enjoyed both the book and the movie. But I'm not sure if I enjoyed the book enough to want to read it again in the future.

I was all set to give it a solid four stars, but unfortunately I found the last act a bit rushed and anticlimactic.

I guess this was supposed to be some terrifying commentary on our world a'la-A Brave New World. However, like ABNW, The Circle imagines a world to an extreme that makes it seem cartoonish.

Mae is an idiot, an unbelievable character. And the “antagonists” to The Circle (the company that the book is named for) are not likable or are able to make compelling arguments. (Granted, everyone working for The Circle seems braindead, so there's that.)

I prefer my apocalypses more... elegant. I'll stick with Orwell.

Wanted to read this before the movie came out, and I got to the final 100 pages before I saw the movie this weekend. The movie followed the book closely in many respects, but differed in many also. I enjoyed this book, although the lack of chapters bothered me a bit for the first part of the book. After a while I didn't notice anymore. The subject of the book is very thought-provoking, and would make for a great book club discussion. Although the book is almost 500 pages, it is a quick read and didn't really feel like a huge book.
The author did a great job of helping the reader understand what the main character was feeling, and that added a lot to the storyline. Would definitely recommend!

I'll get it out of the way now: I was really disappointed in this book.

I went into The Circle pretty cold. I honestly didn't even know the basic premise until I happened to see the movie trailer, which is what prompted me to finally get my hands on the novel. I borrowed my roommate's copy and dove in with only the cinematic preview and the written blurb from the paperback as my references. It really seemed to be my thing: contemporary fiction with some sci-fi and thriller vibes thrown in? I was so down.


If you're like me and have apparently been living under a rock, here's the general premise: A young woman, Mae, is hired at a successful tech company in California (basically Super Google) thanks to a powerful connection–her college friend Annie, who is a higher-up employee of some kind. This company, the Circle, seems to do everything. It controls essentially all social media and is responsible for a great deal of new technological growth.


At first this all seems great! Mae finally has a job that makes her feel important, technology has evolved in such a way that crime may soon be close to wiped out, and it is easier than ever before to connect to others. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that things are more complex than they first appear. The story gets a little predictable–technology gets out of hand and the reader is really forced to confront their morals. At what point does surveillance become too much? At what point is our right to privacy breached?


I really did enjoy the book at first. It sucked me right in and I was really intrigued to see how the culture of the Circle would be developed and what specific problems would arise. I really related to Mae–her willingness to please and to learn, her insecurities, her desperation to mean something to the world. I think we can all relate to this to an extent.


I would say referring to this story as a “heart-racing novel of suspense” (as the blurb on my copy does) is really a stretch. I hit a wall with it about halfway through and had to push myself to finish. Everything started to feel really mechanical and scripted to me. The characters felt two-dimensional, I didn't really have any stake in whether or not they succeeded, and some of the ideas seemed incomplete to me. I felt like we were kind of speeding through everything and a lot of things got lost in the shuffle.


For instance, Mae's relationship with Francis confounded me. After their initial speedbump, I didn't really understand his purpose in reappearing. Her passion for kayaking was dropped without a backward glance, and I almost forgot about it entirely. She abruptly started talking about some “tear” inside her, which was never elaborated on or resolved.


Honestly, the more I think about this book, the less I like it. Sure, it had a great deal of potential and we really should consider the moral conundrums unique to the modern digital age. Had the story itself been more fleshed out, I would have absolutely liked it more. As is, it is more of a poorly concealed word of warning than a well-written piece of literature. This may be one of the only time the movie trumps the book for me–but I'll have to go see it before I decide that.

My final say is: Read The Circle if you're already interested, but if you're on the fence don't go out of your way to read it.

I wanted to like this book, or at least appreciate it. Seeing the trailer for the movie and reading the description for the book made it sound like an interesting near-future thriller. I still have hopes for the movie, but not see-it-in-theaters level hopes, more like catch-it-on-Netflix ones.

The book is at least competently written, but I still gave up on it halfway through and skimmed a bit near the end to get some closure. I just couldn't care enough any more, and not even making snarky notes on my bookmark index card was helping. The social commentary was too ham-fisted, none of the characters were really likeable, and I found myself wanting to tell all of them to take a long walk off a short pier wearing the finest in cement footwear.