The Circle

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.